


who carried the hill

by spqr



Series: Author’s favorites. [9]
Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, background obikin, sentence structure? i dont know her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 01:28:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29323977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: Din’s about to head up the ramp onto the newly-repairedRazor Crestwhen a string pulls taut around his heart and yanks him into the sky.
Relationships: Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker
Series: Author’s favorites. [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1497707
Comments: 103
Kudos: 813





	who carried the hill

**I.** Neither of them remember the first time they met. It wasn’t, technically, a meeting -- a bump of shoulders in crowded cantina in the ass-end of the Tatooine desert, a rundown outpost called Tosche Station that Din’s never been to before and will never visit again, Luke freshly seventeen, old enough to buy alcohol and drunk as a skunk in a rowdy group of his womprat friends, Din looking for a warm meal and a place to sleep while the repair shop at the spaceport finishes airing poisonous gas out of his ship. Din didn’t notice Luke any more than he noticed anyone else in the crowd -- less, even, than the ones that looked like they might be dangerous. If Luke weren’t seeing double and laser-focused on getting lucky with Camie Marstrap, he might have remembered the Mandalorian -- it wasn’t often that one of the galaxy’s most dangerous killers turned up at Tosche -- but he was, so he didn’t. They bumped shoulders once in the crush of the crowd, an almost-moment that never reached its full potential, and moved on.

**II.** The second time they meet, they both remember, because Din never forgets a job and Luke never forgets being dangled over the side of a building. Din’s helping an old friend collect a bounty for Jabba the Hutt, some Outer Rim smuggler who’s managed to give Boba the slip a grand total of eight times, and they’ve been staking out the spaceport where the guy’s ship is berthed for going on eleven hours, lying under a tarp in the pouring rain, when Din spots the wookiee. Generally speaking, when there’s a wookiee, it’s hard _not_ to spot them, but the street’s empty and the wookiee’s protesting as he slogs through knee-deep mud with an astromech droid strapped to his back like a rucksack, which makes things even easier.

There’s a kid with him, big blue eyes through the scope of Din’s rifle, a flash of blond hair under a bucket hat, talking animatedly with his hands under a flappy tan poncho. When Din sees him, he feels a spike of something unexpected in his gut: _fear_.

“That him?” he asks Boba, a quiet mutter.

Boba shakes his head. Slowly, cautiously, the fear dissipates.

When Han Solo finally _does_ show up, they hit him with a long-range stun round before he can make it through the gates of the spaceport, rappel down off the roof and haul him back to _Slave I._ Unfortunately the mud becomes a problem, and the wookiee catches up to them before they can get Solo loaded -- this time carrying Luke on his back, instead of the droid. What insues Din doesn’t like to think about much, because what’s embarrassing in the moment -- Solo slipping through their fingers _yet again_ aided by what looks like the cast of an offbeat holo-com -- becomes a point of deep, nauseating shame later on, when he knows what Luke is to him. When he knows where that split second of fear came from, that it was something in the universe warning him: _don’t shoot_.

**III.** The third time they meet, they’re both in handcuffs. No sooner has Din been shoved into a holding cell on an Imperial star destroyer than Luke comes up off the bench, pointing an accusatory finger, and says, “ _You!”_

Din might feel threatened, if the last time they met he didn’t wrap a rappelling wire around Luke’s ankle and chuck him over the side of a spaceport landing pad, but he did, so he doesn’t.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Me.”

The escape isn’t the most elegant of Din’s career, nor the most dignified -- he has no idea where Luke got such an encyclopaedic knowledge of Imperial trash disposal, but he has a feeling he’ll never get the smell off his armor. Luke insists that they make a detour to the armory to retrieve his laser sword, and Din almost leaves him, but that same instinct that told him _don’t shoot_ tells him to go with the kid, to watch his back, so he does. Luke fights like a tookacat that’s been left in a cage for too long and came out feral, all fervor and no refinement, and more than once Din finds himself swearing and diving to take a hit to his beskar that Luke would’ve taken to his unprotected back. To his surprise, though, Luke saves his skin just as many times -- calling _on your six!_ to save Din from getting slammed in the head by a trooper with an empty blaster, sliding to catch Din by the cape as he’s shoved over the edge of a railing-less catwalk, diving for a closing blast door before it can cut Din off from the transport hangar. It’s almost like Luke knows exactly where he is without ever having to look, and Din suppresses the tiny voice whispering in the back of his head, saying that he feels the same thing -- and that he knows exactly what this is.

**IV.** The fourth time they meet, Din finds Luke curled up around his astromech droid, trying to sleep in the noisy hallways of the Rebel base on Reamma. It’s been a few hours since their daring escape, and Din’s itching to get the hell out of dodge, but the _Razor Crest_ \-- relcaimed from the Imperial hangar deck -- needs some repairs that can’t wait, so he’s grounded for at least a day. Commander Organa, after she’d gotten done trying to recruit him, offered him a private berth for the night, and because the repairs the _Crest_ needs include fixing acid damage to the sleeping quarters, Din accepted. He’d be on his way there now -- he _is_ on his way there now, practically dead on his feet, except for now he’s standing over the crazy kid who saved his life and cracked his collar bone doing it, who has both arms in slings but apparently has nowhere to sleep.

Din doesn’t _want_ to invite the kid to sleep in his berth, because that necessitates all sort of logistics about sleeping with his helmet on or building a little tent in the bunk so he can take it off in peace -- he doesn’t want to bad enough that he walks all the way to the end of the hall before something stops him. Maybe it’s his conscience, maybe it’s that tiny voice in the back of his head, or maybe sometime in their two days of shared captivity he developed a soft spot exactly the size of Luke Skywalker, but whatever it is, he hangs his head, mutters _Dank farrik_ , and turns around.

Luke jolts awake when Din kicks him. Before he can say _Hey!_ , Din tells him, “Get up.”

“Why?” Luke asks, but he gets up, trailing after Din like a puppy.

When they get to the door of Din’s temporary quarters, Din puts out a foot to stop the droid. “You can sleep here,” he tells Luke, “but the droid stays outside.”

“Someday you’ve got to tell me what you have against droids,” Luke says, automatic, but he tells it to stay in the hall -- forcefully, because he’s got the most disobedient droid in the galaxy -- and follows Din into the berth.

It’s impossible to say when it happens -- when Din’s skin touches Luke’s. It might be while they’re shuffling around in the close, stale darkness of the cramped room, swearing and looking for the light, or when Din peels his gloves away from bloody knuckles with a hiss at the sting, or when Luke realizes he can’t settle in to sleep properly with his arms in slings and casts a doleful look at Din without asking, so that Din has no choice, really, but to sigh and sit down on the edge of the bunk and help him. Or it might be in the morning, after Din wakes up curled around his helmet in the top bunk, dusty orange light filtering through the side of his makeshift blanket-tent, when he puts the helmet on and climbs out and starts putting on his armor piece by piece, careful of his bruises and aches, savoring the familiar ritual even with Luke snoring belly-up behind him -- when Luke comes awake on a sneeze and bangs his head against the top bunk and tries to get up in a way that wrenches his collarbone, so Din has to crouch next to him and hold his shoulders to keep him from hurting himself more.

Or it might have been sometime over the two days before, existing in close quarters in their Imperial cell and then sticking close to each other on the escape. Maybe there was a moment when Din reached out to catch Luke and the kid’s fingertips touched his bare wrist, or a second when they were sleeping back-to-back on that metal slab that the napes of their necks bumped.

Whatever it was, it happened. Sometime in the space of seventy-two hours, without either of them even noticing it, they each ceased to be one man alone, and became one of two.

**V.** The fifth time they meet -- well, probably Din ought to stop counting meetings.

The fifth time, Din’s about to head up the ramp onto the newly-repaired _Razor Crest_ when a string pulls taut around his heart and yanks him into the sky.

Obviously, it’s not a sensation Din’s ever experienced before -- being yanked around by his heart -- but it only takes him a few seconds of spinning wildly through the sky, cape flapping in his face, to spot the X-wing above him and figure out what happened.

“ _Kark,_ ” he bites, and fires his jetpack.

He lands hard on the nose of the X-wing and slams down on his hands and knees, struggling for purchase. Luke stares at him through the windshield with wide eyes and yells something that looks like _Are you insane?!,_ but Din can’t hear through the rush of wind and the anemic pounding of his own pulse, so he just makes _Land the karking ship!!_ motions until the kid gets with the program and does.

“Are you insane?!” Luke demands, as soon as they’re on solid ground.

Din, who was starting to run out of oxygen at the end there, is seeing stars, doubled over and wheezing, so when he tries to say, “ _Dyad_ ,” it comes out more like _dynnnnnnnnghhh_.

“What?” Luke says.

His astromech droid -- Artoo, Din’s heard him call it -- is swearing a blue streak in the back of the X-wing. Din’s droidspeak isn’t very good, but he thinks he hears _idiot_ and _totally karking obvious_ and something about the state of the education system on Tatooine, which, what?

Luke must understand better than he does, because he snorts and says, “No way, Artoo. Are you nuts?”

Artoo beeps and trills some more.

Luke glowers. “I _know_ what a dyad is, thanks. But there’s no way -- well, for one, Han would kill me, and then Leia would kill me, and then maybe Chewie, and besides, there’s no way I’m the fated partner of a _Mandalorian -- “_

Din sighs. It’s starting to sink in, like a dawning horror, that he’s been bound for all eternity to a nineteen-year-old idiot with a penchant for righteousness. As far as he’s concerned there’s really only one solution to this specific problem -- and that’s not because he’s still feeling a little miffed to have been taken for an involuntary low-atmo joyride before he’s even had his morning caf.

(Well, not _just_ because.)

He fires his jetpack again and takes to the sky, Luke yelling and flailing along on a tight thread below him.

**VI.** _Excerpts from the private journals of Padmé Amidala. Royal Archive of Naboo, released to Leia Organa upon request._

“Ani returned to Coruscant today, after eight weeks of fighting on Umbara. He seemed tired -- more tired than usual. I know the Senate and the Jedi Council require much of him, but something about his exhaustion was different, this time, as if his soul were as beaten as his body. I couldn’t comfort him, not with words or with my body, though I’m ashamed to say I tried the latter more than the former. Lovemaking has always been easier for us than conversation -- but I’m afraid conversation is all that can solve this…”

“I told Ani today that I was worried about him. The fact that he didn’t immediately brush me off only made me worry more -- he’s always so concerned with saving face, with appearing to be the brave and impenetrable _Hero Without Fear_ , even around me, but today he just _folded._ I held him for what must have been hours, until he fell asleep. Neither of us said anything. I had the strangest feeling that if I’d said anything he would have come apart like wet paper. I know I have to ask again, keep pressing, but I’m afraid. Not of Ani, never of Ani -- but that whatever’s plaguing him might be something beyond my ability to fix. I wish there were someone I could ask for advice, but on the topic of Ani there is only one other expert, and Obi-Wan is still on the frontlines…”

“The night of our wedding, I remember thinking there was something Ani wanted to confess to me. It was a distant, niggling doubt, like the beginning of a toothache, and I put it out of my mind in favor of pure, overwhelming happiness, but I wonder now if that was the beginning -- if I’ve spent our whole marriage hurting Anakin because I’m too afraid to hurt myself…”

“Today Ani was taken to the Halls of Healing. No one notified me, of course, but I heard from a friend who was visiting the Temple, so I came up with some urgent Senate business that would keep me all day in the vicinity of my injured husband. There was no word. Likely there will be none until his condition improves or worsens -- even Ahsoka, who knows that Ani and I care for each other, doesn’t know to keep me as informed as a wife should be. It’s times like these, especially, that I wish we didn’t have to hide…”

“Ani has been deployed again for Umbara. He leaves in the morning. Now, as I write this, he’s asleep in our bed, still recovering from the stresses that put him in a hospital bed, and though I wish I could join him, my mind is wide awake, and suddenly there’s the strange feeling that to lie next to him would be trespassing. He told me today -- still under the influence of some anesthetic, I’m sure -- that he is part of a dyad. That he has been bound, since he was a boy, to his master, Obi-Wan. I am not sure how to feel about this. For now, my mind refuses to integrate it, like pollen floating on water, but somehow I predict that I’ll react more with _guilt_ than with hurt. No one has stolen my husband; instead, I have stolen half of a man’s soul -- a man who I consider a friend. It’s a crime which I have no idea how to remedy…”

“I realized today, as I saw Ani off at the shipyard, that I’ve never heard of two beings in a dyad being able to separate themselves by as much distance as he and Obi-Wan have. I wonder if this is a particular ability of the jedi, or a particular ability of my husband’s. I’m still numb; the only thing I feel this morning is out of my depth; I think I shall request access to the Jedi Archives on some pretense to try and learn more…”

**VII.** “ _Now_ you want to work for me,” says Commander Organa, dubious. “Why the change of heart?”

“I had a crisis of conscience,” Din deadpands. “I want to be a good guy now.”

It’s total pfassk, and they both know it -- Organa squinting at him over the big desk in her temporary office on Reamma -- but the fact that Din demanded 500 credits a week probably helps her swallow it, because she says, “Okay. I guess I can shell out for a one-man army. It’ll let me rotate the advance team out more, anyway. You’re alright with your berth assignment?”

“Yeah,” says Din, and then, “Actually, I found myself a roommate. Someone unassigned. If that’s okay.”

Luke’s waiting for him in their shared berth when he gets back. “What’d she say?” he demands.

He’s buzzing with directionless energy, and Din can sympathize -- they have, after all, just been delivered a life-altering piece of news, and next steps are sort of nebulous beyond the obvious _stick together_ \-- but there’s no point in being hasty. What would they do, anyways? Fall into bed? Run out and find someone who’s ordained and get married? Din’s a patient man. If they wait this out, he thinks, maybe it will go away. Maybe it was a mistake.

“Din?” Luke asks.

“Yeah,” Din says. “We’re good. I’m staying.”

“Well, obviously you’re _staying_ ,” Luke says, but there’s relief in his voice. He flops back on his bunk with a sigh. “Kriffing hell. I’m gonna have to learn to fly a Y-wing.”

“What?” Din asks. “Why?”

“The X-wing doesn’t fit two people. How are you as a gunner?”

“No,” Din says. “No karking way.”

The ensuing argument -- if Luke shouting and Din walking silently and steadily away from him can even be called an _argument_ \-- teaches them that their tether lets them put about a hundred yards between them before it starts to tighten, a hundred fifty before it stops stretching and pulls taut. It’s a short leash, probably the most closely-tied to something Din’s ever been, but later that night, when he’s lying in his little tent on the top bunk, staring at the blanket a few inches above his face and listening to the shallow, even sounds of Luke snoring beneath him, he thinks that there’s something comforting about it, about the fact that, whatever they might say or do to each other, Luke can never do what his covert did -- he can never pick up in the dead of night, and leave.

Neither of them are given an off-world assignment for a week, which Din assumes is a concession to their recent brush with the Imperial prison system, but Luke has maintenance to perform on his X-wing and Din has orientation to attend with the other hired guns.

There aren’t many of them -- from what Din understands, they’re a sort of pilot program, testing if Commander Organa can accurately root out those with Imperial sympathies. In the first session he enters into a silent agreement with a woman called Cara Dune, and over a lunch where Din eats nothing and Cara eats enough to feed three rancors, they trade information and build a more complete picture of what’s going on. Organa, trying to fight a war with barely enough personnel to staff one Imperial destroyer, has been working her people at a pace that should burn them out in about eight months, according to the Alliance’s one exhausted psychologist. Before Yavin, she might’ve been able to get away with it, giving the soldiers enough downtime, but now the Empire’s scouring the galaxy for them in earnest so staying hidden means moving, a lot, and moving that much means that there’s always a lot of work to be done around base and not enough people to do it. And that’s not even counting offworld missions.

“The Rebellion’s burned out,” Cara summarizes, taking a swig of Corellian ale. “Half the troops have lost their marbles and the other half didn’t have any when they signed up. Plus, someone told me they’re broke.”

“Broke?” Din echoes.

“Yeah. I bet the Princess is paying out of her own pocket. Though, where she got the credits, I couldn’t tell you -- the royal coffers got vaporized right along with the rest of the planet.”

There’s only the barest hint of grief in her eyes, and Din wonders what that’s like -- to have to turn your face into a mask, instead of just wearing one. He’s not sure he’d be very good about it. He’s not sure, if he had to talk about Nevarro, about his lost covert, that he could keep a straight face. It’s a good thing he doesn’t have to. The helmet and the voice modulator do it for him.

He pays attention, after their conversation, to the mental states of the beings around him. It’s not as obvious as Cara made it out to be -- it never is, really. Most of the beings keep their spirits up, have loud meals and rowdy drinking games and spend their downtime playing musical-bedmates, like armies always do, but at the periphery there’s a sense of something unstable, a structure in danger of collapsing. Some of them drink just a little too much. Some make jokes that go way past morbid, like the man who comes back from a mission with a stormtrooper’s severed arm for a prop, laughing and laughing while he tries to get people to shake hands with it until Solo puts him flat on the floor with a right hook. A few, according to Cara’s friend in the medbay, develop psychosomatic paralysis of their firing arms; a few more find religion with the sort of fanatic thoughtlessness that makes Organa put them on involuntary leave.

Luke has nightmares.

Din’s not sure how he _knows_ Luke has nightmares, since they never wake him, but somehow in the mornings he can always tell -- he wakes up feeling the same as he did when he was a child and spent the night re-living his parents’ deaths, a knot of nausea at the base of his throat, unsettled all day like he forgot something vital in his morning routine, but isn’t sure what. He almost asks Luke about it a half dozen times, but Luke always looks so haggard and pale on those mornings that he can never bring himself to do it.

Another pilot pulls Din aside after the lunch break one day -- Darklighter, Din thinks his name is.

“Listen,” he says, pitching his voice low. “I hear you’re bunking with Skywalker.”

Something in his tone raises Din’s hackles, but he just nods.

“Me and some of the guys were talking. I know we don’t know you too good, but we’re all buddies here, so if you want out, we can shuffle some of our assignments around, free up an extra bunk.”

Din frowns. “What?”

“Well, you know, he’s a good kid. I knew him back on Tatooine. Hell of a pilot. But he didn’t know what he was getting into when he signed up to fight a war. Now he’s got half a million deaths on his conscience. That makes for more -- you know, a hell of a lot more screaming at night than anyone should have to put up with. I should know, I bunked with him on Yavin. Had to beg the Commander not to stick me with him again.”

Darklighter’s looking at him sympathetically, like they really are buddies. Din doesn’t _want_ to punch him, even though he does, because he knows it will just make things harder for him in the long run if the pilots are all out to get him, but if the guy puts a hand on his shoulder he won’t be able to control what happens next.

“No,” he tells Darklighter. “Kriff off.”

The friendly expression drops of Darklighter’s face, but he kriffs off and doesn’t give Din any more trouble.

That night, Din doesn’t sleep. He lies awake, listening to Luke, and when he doesn’t hear anything he climbs down from the top bunk and pulls a chair quietly up to the beds, so he can sit and watch him sleep.

His eyes trace the lines of Luke’s face, even younger in sleep than in waking. The flop of his blond hair across his forehead, moving with the huff of his breath. Din feels like he must be missing something. Luke looks peaceful. He looks warm, and comfortable. He doesn’t look like someone who has screaming nightmares every time he closes his eyes. But then again -- _half a million deaths,_ Darklighter had said. What he meant by that Din doesn’t know, but he does know about the mornings when Luke wakes up looking like he never went to bed.

He reaches forward with half a mind to wake him, but then Luke makes a soft sound, shifting in sleep, and his hand stops before it can reach him. He puts it on the edge of the bed, instead, bare inches away from Luke’s own fingers, and sits like that, in the safety of their bubble, until day starts turning the sky dishwater grey outside.

On the ninth day, Luke finds Din in the middle of a sparring session with Cara and says, “I need to talk to you.”

Din’s stomach drops. He can feel Cara making huge _what the kark?_ eyes at his back as he breaks off, but he doesn’t look back -- Luke is pacing over by the bo staffs, either distressed or in deep thought (sometimes it’s hard to tell), and lately Din has had to admit to himself that the soft spot he might have developed might be growing. If nothing else, he doesn’t like it when Luke is in distress.

“What is it?” he asks, when he’s close enough.

Luke stops, angled away from the gym, so no one else can hear them. “Leia wants me to fly a supply run to Dantooine.”

“Okay,” Din says slowly. “So…”

“So we have to figure out a way to get you on it.”

Din sighs. _Honestly._ Bonded to an idiot. “I know how to get me on it,” he says.

Luke’s eyes widen. “Really? How?”

Which is how Din ends up standing in front of Commander Organa, Luke stewing furiously in the hall outside -- having lost the argument by virtue of being too much of a coward to follow Din into the office -- saying, “We’re a dyad.”

Organa stares at him for a long moment, then hangs her head. “I should’ve known,” she mutters, then raises her voice and shouts into the hall, “Luke! Get in here, you spineless nerf-herder! I can’t _believe_ you thought you could hide this from me!”

An hour later, after Din’s gotten a crash-course in Y-wing controls from Luke’s very annoyed gunner, they’re on their way to Dantooine with a fleet of transport shuttles. They’re bringing up the rear, so all Din can see out his viewscreen is empty space, black and yawning around them.

Luke’s been pissy and silent since he got chewed out by Commander Organa back in her office. Normally Din wouldn’t mind the silence -- he almost always _prefers_ silence, actually -- but this silence feels like he’s dropped the ball somehow, so he clears his throat and says, “I hear you have nightmares.”

He feels Luke go still behind him. After a minute, he says, “I’m sorry if I’m keeping you up at night.”

“No. You aren’t.” Din wants to turn and look at him, but he can’t, so instead he calls Luke’s face to mind, slack-jawed and peaceful in sleep. “I haven’t heard anything. But Darklighter told me…”

“Biggs needs to mind his own kriffing business,” Luke mutters.

“You’re not taking neurotrops, are you?”

“ _What?”_ Luke tries to turn around in his seat -- Din can tell from all the wiggling around that happens behind him, even if he can’t see it. “ _Neurotrops?_ Are you crazy?”

“Look,” Din says, flushing under his helmet. It’s embarrassing, worrying about someone. “All I know is, Darklighter told me you used to have screaming nightmares, but since we started bunking I haven’t heard so much as a peep.”

“So you ask me if I’m on _neurotrops?”_ Luke boggles.

Din lets his silence serve as a shrug.

Luke swears under his breath, a hush of static over their comms, and settles back in his seat. They ride in silence for a few minutes, long enough that Din starts to wish he hadn’t spoken at all. Finally Luke says, in a small voice, “I used to. Have nightmares, I mean. But now…I think I can feel you, when I’m asleep. Your mind. It’s calming. I feel the nightmare start, like I’m about to fall, and then you’re there, and it all just…stops, I guess. Like you reached out and caught me.”

Din just breathes for a second, letting that sink into his bones -- that this is one more way they’re connected. Then he exhales, centering himself, and says, “Okay.”

**VIII.** _Personal correspondence, Satine Kryze to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Recovered by Alderaanian Royal Library._

“My dearest Obi-Wan,

“I fear all this talk of dyads can only make the two of us more heartsick than we already are. You for your idiot padawan, and me for you. It’s strange -- I should be ashamed to discuss my unrequited affections with you, their object, but I am not. Perhaps that speaks to the depth of our friendship. Perhaps I have gone off the deep end. Either way, do not mention it to my council -- affection for a jedi and insanity are both impeachable offenses.

“You asked when last we met for information on Mandalorian dyads; I’ve spent what time I can scouring our archives, but there are scant few references left. The Children of the Watch have seen to that. Despite the rarity of dyads forming among those who are not Force-sensitive -- my mother once referred to it as ‘lightning striking the same tree twice, but not a third time’ -- the Watch believe that they must hide their faces, and hide their skin, to avoid the possibility of finding a dyad. The worry is that a dyad would instill greater allegiance -- greater loyalty -- than to their Creed. There are no children born inside the Watch. There are no marriages. There is only the Way. I expect you jedi should sympathize.

“As for Mandalorian dyads from ancient times, I found no concrete references, but perhaps an old children’s tale will do: _In a time before time, the first Mand’alor came to our planet with one arm and one leg. His fighting was unbalanced, and often he had to run from his enemies instead of facing them. One day he was walking to the river for a bath when a great beast set upon him, a fearsome mythosaur with gnashing jaws. He fought it valiantly, but with only one arm and one leg, it overpowered him, and slashed him with its claws. He would have died, if a beautiful woman had not arrived out of the hills -- she too had only one arm and one leg, but when she helped him to his feet, the bare skin of their hands touched, and they became whole. Together, they bested the mythosaur and took its bones for armor, and their children were born whole, with two arms and two legs, for they were the offspring of a dyad._

“I remember, as children, my sister and I would play battle games on one foot, with one hand tied behind our backs, trying to prove we were mightier warriors than the first Mand’alor. My mother would laugh for hours.

“I’m sorry I don’t have more to offer, but I shall keep looking in my -- admittedly scarce -- free time. As always, my offer to give Anakin a stern talking-to, or a swift kick in the ass, still stands. All I want is your happiness. And perhaps, also, a brief vacation.

“Love, always,

“Satine.”

**IX.** The Rebellion is not the first war Din’s been hired to fight. It is, maybe, the biggest, the most hopeless, the war with the widest scope, but it’s not the first. And it’s not unique.

His first war was fought in the red dust of Geonosis, an insectoid slugfest between two Ducal Hives, endless weeks of death and thirst and buzzing wings and crushed exoskeletons littering the terrain like ash. He never learned what the fighting was about; he was fifteen at the time, freshly-sworn to the Creed and still clumsy with bravado, puffed up with pride -- quickly squashed, in the terror of battle -- with the idea that Paz would consider him an equal, would bring him to fight a grown-man’s war.

The lessons Din learned on Geonosis stuck with him, formed the foundations of his endurance: _Don’t hate. Hate is hot, and cool heads prevail. Don’t use stims. Stim-crash is worse than regular exhaustion. Fear doesn’t break a fighter -- guilt does. Kill by the Creed, trust the Creed, and don’t look back._

Din trusted the Creed, and he didn’t look back, not in the swamps of Lothal, where he swallowed live frogs when he ran out of ration bars, or in the grasslands of Azbrian, where he chewed dry millet for nutrients and rode eight-legged pack animals into battle. Lack of food, he knows, can snap a spirit just as surely as losing a limb, as can lack of sleep.

“Sleep when you can,” Paz told him, during that first war, “and eat when you can, and you’ll come through alright.”

Their sleeping arrangements mean Din knows exactly how much Luke sleeps -- and though six hours a night isn’t ideal, it’s better than a lot of the rest seem to be getting. But watching how Luke eats requires more attention.

Like the vast majority of the beings serving in the Rebel army, Luke doesn’t have any real experience in combat. Din knows, from their late-night conversations and their long trips in the Y-wing, that Luke grew up on a moisture farm on Tatooine, that most of his knowledge lies in farming and flying, and that all he’s had in the way of combat training has been panicked flashes of trial-by-fire, gunning down TIE fighters in the heat of the moment and getting by on pure luck. Luke doesn’t know that eating is important, because in war you never know where your next meal is going to come from, or that sleep is important for the same reason.

He doesn’t know how to carry the weight of the lives he’s taken, or the ones he failed to save, and he doesn’t know the old Mandalorian adage -- that pain shared is pain halved.

Din’s never been good at talking about his own emotions, let alone someone else’s, so he decides to start with food. In this pursuit, disturbingly enough, Luke’s astromech droid becomes his ally.

[half portion fava beans,] Artoo messages him, one lunch.

[a bite of han’s bantha jerky,] the next.

[corellian ale,] the day after that, when Luke staggers home three sheets to the wind and singing an old space shanty at the top of his lungs.

Din sighs. Luke’s asleep the moment his head hits the pillow, going from shouting to snoring in a second flat. Din climbs down out of his tent, not bothering to put his helmet on -- there’s nothing like Corellian ale on an empty stomach to knock a man out -- and tugs Luke’s boots off, setting them next to the bed.

In the morning, he gets up early and takes Luke’s ration card down to the mess to pick up breakfast. If he were anyone else, the mess master might accuse him of trying to swipe Luke’s portion, but she’s always teasing Din about having a soft spot for his roommate, so she just smiles knowingly as she hands over two bowls of oatmeal. “You make sure that boy eats,” she tells him. “Even jedi need food.”

Din’s still not sure what a ‘jedi’ is, so he just says, “Thanks.”

He’s sipping caf with his helmet tipped up to his nose when Luke groans awake, but he puts the caf down and goes over to kick the bedpost until Luke quits groaning and gets up, saying, _“Stars!_ I’m up, you _nerf-herder_ , I’m up!”

“I thought you were a farmer,” Din accuses, at the table.

Luke glowers over his caf. He hasn’t touched his oatmeal yet. “Nights are longer on Tatooine.”

Din nudges the oatmeal towards him. “You need to eat.”

Luke looks at it like it might decide to grow legs and crawl around. “I’m not hungry.”

“I don’t care,” Din says. “You need to eat.”

Luke stares at him for a long moment, like they’re having some sort of a standoff, but one of the benefits of always wearing a helmet is that Din never loses a staring contest, so after a minute Luke breaks off with a sigh and picks up his oatmeal.

Din watches him shovel down a few mouthfuls, then says, “People keep calling you a _jedi._ ”

Luke nods.

“What’s a _jedi_?”

Luke blinks at him, surprised. “You don’t know?”

Din doesn’t answer. He has a feeling he’s about to be laughed at, and silence is the best way to hedge his bets.

“It’s, um,” Luke starts, setting down his oatmeal and frowning at the tabletop. “I’ve never had to explain it before. It’s like an order of mystic warriors, I guess. My lightsaber, that’s a jedi weapon. And I can use the Force.”

“The Force?” Din asks.

“Yeah, let me…” Luke holds his hand out towards his spoon, hovering above it, and closes his eyes in concentration.

After a moment, the spoon rises into his hand as if pulled on an invisible string.

Din stares, feeling something in his throat that’s oddly like fear.

Luke gives an embarrassed little shrug and puts down the spoon. “That’s about as much as I can do, really. My teacher died before he could tell me most of it -- I only knew him for a few days. But I can hear his voice in my mind sometimes. That was how I made the shot that blew up the Death Star.”

“You _blew up the Death Star?”_ Din echoes.

“I -- “ Luke closes his mouth, startled. “Yes? I thought you knew all this.”

 _Half a million deaths,_ Din remembers. Stars.

Luke’s blinking rapidly, staring at the tabletop again. “I can move my stuff onto the _Falcon_.”

Since Solo got back from wherever the hell he was when Din first arrived, the two of them have had four fistfights, and only the first one was about Din trying to freeze him in carbonite. Din doesn’t even really like that Solo and Luke are friends, and the idea of Luke _bunking with him_ , curled up soft and vulnerable while Solo snores in the same room, makes him want to hit something.

“No,” he says. “Why would you -- “

“I mean, if you’re not comfortable. I know some of the guys weren’t too happy about sleeping next to a mass murderer back on Yavin, even though we all flew that run, we all would’ve taken the shot -- “

“Luke,” Din interrupts, quiet but firm. “I don’t want you to sleep somewhere else. This doesn’t change anything.” And, because that hardly seems like enough, given the enormity of what they’re discussing, he takes off his glove and reaches over the table.

Luke just stares at his bare hand for a moment, red-eyed. Then he reaches out, tentative, like Din might change his mind, and settles their palms together.

Din holds on tight.

From Reamma they move to Talrezan Four, fleeing a mere two hours ahead of an Imperial patrol in a whirlwind of packing and tightly-controlled fear, hundreds of beings packed onto not enough transports and people running flat-out through the halls in a panic of being left behind. There’s barely time for official assignments, so Din helps Cara and her friend in medbay pack up crates of medicine and surgical equipment and a bacta tank, which they have to drain and then recruit ten men to carry out to the _Razor Crest_. By the time they’re done, the _Crest_ is the only ship left, other than Luke’s Y-wing, and Cara tries to get him on-board with her -- he says, “No. I’ll go with Luke,” and she shouts back, _“Skywalker?!_ You’re better off with us, Mando, that kid’s crazy!” but he’s already running across the courtyard in the harsh wind of the transport’s firing engines, his cape flapping around his shins, and finding Luke’s Y-wing empty.

His stomach drops, but he knows in his rational mind Luke can’t have gone far. He plunges back into the abandoned halls of the base, echoing and cavernous now that they’ve been cleaned out, shouting Luke’s name.

Of all kriffing places, he finds Luke in Commander Organa’s office, trying to coax a shiny gold protocol droid out of the closet. “Oh, Master Luke, I just _can’t_ ,” the droid is saying, piteous, and Luke urges, “Sure you can, Threepio, it’s just a little hyperspace jump -- “

“Luke,” Din says, from the doorway.

Luke turns to look at him. “Din,” he says.

“What are you doing?”

“Threepio’s scared of spaceflight,” Luke says, like that explains everything.

“So leave it!” Din says, incredulous.

“No!” Luke exclaims, at the same time the droid says, “Master _Luke_ ,” tremulous.

Din sighs, shoulders Luke aside, and hits the droid’s off button. It powers down with a last word of protest, eyes going dim, and Luke says, “That’s rude, you know.”

“I’ll worry about it later,” Din tells him. “Right now, we need to _get the hell out of here_.”

They carry the droid between them back to the Y-wing, stuff it in the voidproof storage compartment, and manage to zip off into hyperspace a split second before three Imperial cruisers arrive in orbit around Reamma.

The base on Talrezan Four is built into the side of a mountain. There are only two ways up -- by ship, or by goat-path, ledges which are so narrow and precarious that they’ve been abandoned for hundreds of years by the local population, who mostly live in the valleys between mountain ranges. The interior of the base is more vertical than the one on Reamma, small circular floors which extend almost a mile down into the mountain, and even though they only have enough people to use about a quarter of the space, Luke and Din discover that they have to be careful about how far they get from each other, lest one of them be yanked into the ceiling and knocked out cold.

Commander Organa excuses Din from his duties with the other mercenaries and assigns him and Luke to the gym six hours a day, so they can learn to fight as a team. Luke’s got enthusiasm in droves, but he doesn’t have any skills, never learned the basics, so Din mostly spends that time running him through drills that he mastered when he was ten, katas and combinations and grappling holds that seem simple but have saved his skin a hundred times.

Luke, to his surprise, never complains. When he catches Din watching him oddly on one of the first days he only says, “Look. Me knowing this might save your life one day, right? So I’m going to learn it. I’m going to get it right.”

Din, suddenly feeling as if he can’t speak, only nods.

At night, they lie side by side in the metal shell of their crush pod -- two bunks wide, made to survive a cave-in -- with Din’s helmet resting between their stomachs. There’s no light in the crush pod, and Luke always closes his eyes when they open it in the morning, considerate, but in the dark he sometimes reaches for Din’s face and Din sometimes lets him, holding still as Luke’s fingers trace the bridge of his nose, his stubble, the line of his jaw.

“Is it weird for you?” Luke asks, on one of these nights, barely more than a whisper.

Somewhere in the mountain, there’s probably shouting and clanging -- there’s always shouting and clanging -- but in here, it’s as quiet as if the rock really _had_ caved in, trapping them down here together, leaving them to die in each other’s arms. Din doesn’t think he would mind dying this way. His limbs feel heavy and his heart feels full, and he hooks one finger in the hem of Luke’s shirt before he asks, “Is what weird for me?”

“That no one knows what you look like,” Luke answers. Then, softer, maybe more truthfully, “That I don’t know what you look like.”

His fingertips sink in Din’s curls. Din lets his head bow closer to Luke’s on the pillows. His mouth wants to seek out Luke’s in the dark, but he doesn’t let it. He can’t risk it. “You know the important stuff,” he says, instead.

“Yeah,” Luke mumbles. He always mumbles when sleep’s about to take him, when it’s tugging at him but he doesn’t want to give in yet. “Yeah, I guess I do. You know the important stuff about me, too.”

Some days, Din doesn’t feel like he does -- when he watches Luke close his eyes and make an impossible shot, watches Luke catch blaster fire on his lightsaber that he couldn’t possibly have seen coming, watches how people act around him, even his so-called friends, like they’re playing sabacc with a legend instead of a twenty-year-old kid. Sometimes he feels like there’s a part of Luke he’ll never be able to touch, won’t even be able to comprehend, will only ever catch glimpses of, and he has to remind himself that it doesn’t matter. That Luke isn’t composed of mystic silences and ghost visions, that he’s a farmboy from the deserts of Tatooine who argues with his droid and has a heart bigger than an exogorth and swears like he learned how from an Outer Rim smuggler, which probably he did. He knows the mistakes Luke’s made -- that Luke thinks he’s made. And he knows where Luke comes home to. Where he sleeps. What else is there?

**X.** _Excerpts from the private journals of Padmé Amidala. Royal Archive of Naboo, released to Leia Organa upon request._

“Three weeks now I’ve been working with Master Jocasta Nu, the archivist of the Jedi Temple, on a project which I proposed under false pretenses. Jocasta believes that I am producing a report for Chancellor Palpatine on the possibility of a Sith dyad, but in reality I am seeking information on the bond between my husband and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Even to myself, the purpose of my search remains unclear -- I can only hope that in understanding their bond I might somehow find peace in what I sense is the coming end of my marriage. In inevitability, there might be a sort of comfort…”

“Came across a relevant passage today in a volume entitled Irregular Bonds: Case Studies for Mind-Healers. Reproduced here: _The dyad bond, once formed, is unbreakable. Jedi Master Sonam-Ha’ar, during the Hyperspace Wars, discovered a way for a jedi to traverse great distances without the company of their dyad, by locating the tether of the bond deep within one’s mind and plunging it into a well of Force energy…_ I admit I only understand partially what this might mean, and since I cannot seek explanation without revealing my true purpose, I must instead commit to more reading…”

“There were holos of Ani and Obi-Wan on the news today. The Hero Without Fear and the Negotiator, fighting back to back in a sea of droids. I wonder if their dyad bond is what allows them to fight together so well, or if it’s their years of intimate jedi training, or both. I wonder if the master-padawan relationship is the only one they’ve ever cultivated, or if they’ve been intimate in other ways -- oh, I know it’s uncharitable of me, to fixate on the sexual aspect of all this, but it seems impossible not to think of. Part of me hopes that they have never gone to bed together, that I’m the only one who’s ever known Ani in that way, but part of me knows how painful it would be for the two of them, so entwined, to exist for so long in such close orbit and never meet. In loving my husband I must pray that he has also loved another man…”

**XI.** Slowly but surely, like a tree turning towards the sun, Din feels his entire being turn towards Luke. He wakes up reaching for Luke. He falls asleep thinking of Luke, even if he’s been lying awake for hours staring at the underside of their crush pod and remembering how Paz used to prod him along with short rough touches to his shoulder and wondering where he’s gone, where they’ve all gone -- Luke will snuffle softly in sleep and turn onto his back, onto his side, folding closer to Din in the dark, and Din’s thoughts will shift abruptly from the ache of his old home to the fresh, peaceful dell of his new one, not here in this place but here with this kid. _Fear is born from happiness_ , the Armorer told him once, and Din tries to determine whether he feels more scared now, moving with Luke through the field of battle, if there exists some terror of losing him, now that he has him, but it’s difficult to say, because if there _is_ terror there’s also this: the absolute certainty of Luke at his back, of Luke in his bed at night, of Luke every day brewing caf barefoot in their room’s tiny kitchen, rolling his eyes at Din telling him he’s making it wrong, saying, _It’s caf, Din, there’s no way to make it right_.

**XII.** “ _Where’s Luke?!”_ Commander Organa shouts.

She has to shout, to be heard -- the wind from the transports taking off around them multiplied with the noise of the storm they’re using as cover is loud enough that Din can barely hear himself think.

“ _I’ll find him!”_ he calls back, a second before the thread around his heart yanks him over the side of the mountain.

Heart in his throat, he manages to snag the edge of the platform with his fingers, which is good because his jetpack is still broken after a recon mission to Hoth last week, and in a matter of seconds Chewbacca is there, roaring in the driving rain as he grabs Din’s arms and hauls him back to safety.

The moment he’s free, Din’s back at the edge of the platform, braced on his hands and knees as he peers over, rain spiraling down into oblivion around him, to where Luke is hanging unconscious in thin air.

“ _LUKE!”_ he yells.

He’s startled by the volume of his own voice, but it doesn’t matter -- the wind snatches it away as soon as it leaves his throat. Chewie roars behind him, and that disappears too, just another echo in the canyon. Luke doesn’t move. He’s dead, Din thinks, and then -- I’ll have to go with him, because I can’t coexist with his corpse.

“Move!” Commander Organa shouts, tugging at Din’s shoulder. “Djarin, get up! You’ve got to get far enough away -- we can pull him back up with the tether -- “

Din gets with the program. He races back into the empty base -- the second time in as many emergency evacuations that he’s done that -- and heads up into the hollow peak of the mountain until he sees out of one of the high, thin windows in the stairwell that they’ve got Luke back up on the platform.

He makes it back down just as Organa and Chewie are loading Luke onto the _Falcon_ on a gurney. Someone else is climbing in their Y-wing, and Organa waves to him from the _Falcon’s_ open ramp. “Come on, Djarin!”

Din runs, and steps onto the edge of the ramp just as it begins to close.

Luke looks small on the cot in the _Falcon’s_ medbay, bright blood streaked in rainwater across his face and his shoulder at an unnatural angle under his orange jumpsuit. “What happened?” Din croaks.

Organa sighs, scrolling through a readout of Luke’s vitals. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

The ship judders through turbulence. Din steps forward, intending to strap Luke in, but Organa gets there before he can, her hands quick and familiar. Din swallows. “Commander -- “

“Leia,” the Commander interrupts. At Din’s silence, she explains, “You’re bonded to one of my best friends, which makes you part of the family. You should call me Leia."

“Leia,” Din says. “Call me Din, then.”

She inclines her head. “Din. What were you going to say?”

“Just that Luke’s not clumsy, ma’am.”

“No _ma’am_ s, either,” Leia says absently, but she’s frowning down at Luke now, thinking over what Din’s said. “You think he was pushed?”

“I don’t know,” Din says. “I just don’t think he tripped.”

Leia nods once and stands, her air of authority returned. “I have to make some calls. You’ll look after him?”

“I will,” Din assures her.

According to Talrezan Four planetary time, it’s the middle of the night by the time Din finishes setting Luke’s dislocated shoulder, cleaning out his head wound and dressing it with a bacta bandage. The medscan registers no brain damage and no internal bleeding, which is lucky, since this hunk of junk probably isn’t equipped to deal with anything that serious. Din watches Luke sleep for a few minutes -- the deep, motionless sleep of the knocked unconscious -- willing him to open his eyes and say something, anything, _kriff off_ or _who stomped on my head?_ When he doesn’t, when he just lies there in stasis like a body on a bier, Din lowers himself down to sit on the floor beside him, takes off one glove, and holds Luke’s hand, resting his helmet against the cot.

He wakes some time later to Luke squeezing his fingers, saying, “Din.”

Din goes up on his knees. Luke’s eyes are open, still woozy but the same blue as they’ve always been. He clutches tight to Din’s hand, and Din hardly has time to feel the relief of his waking before Luke says, “Leia. I need to talk to Leia.”

When they’re all gathered around the med cot -- Leia holding Luke’s hand, Din hovering nearby, Han leaning in the open door and Chewie left on the controls -- Luke explains what happened back on the mountain. “There’s a spy,” he says. “Deng Wadell. I caught him sending a short-range transmission to the upper atmosphere. Figured it must have been that Imperial probe we picked up. I chased him out onto the platform and he pushed me.”

“He’s a pilot,” Leia says, grave. “He knows we’re going to Hope Station. We have to change course.”

She sweeps out of the room, Han adjusting his stance to giver her space to pass through. The smuggler’s still watching Luke intently, a frown on his face, and Din might not like the man much but he figures at least they’ve got this in common -- not wanting to see Luke hurt.

“You up for an ambush?” Han asks Luke.

If Din knows one thing about Luke, as a soldier, it’s that he’d never say _no_ to a question like that. For all that he might bitch and moan about the little stuff, he never complains when it really matters.

“Yeah,” he tells Han, even though he looks like a strong wind might blow him over. “You know me. Always up for an ambush.”

An hour later, two ships -- Deng Wandell’s, and the _Falcon_ \-- come in for a landing at Hope Station. Anchored in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant, the station is shielded by refracting panels on all sides, invisible to radar and the naked eye, so that the only way to find it is if you have the exact frequency necessary to access the landing code. Din knows Wandell must have sent the frequency to the Imperials already, and he’s half-expecting to be shot out of the sky the second they’re past the shields, but all they find is Wandell’s transport, the half-dozen Rebels he flew here milling around in the courtyard with rebreathers on, looking confused.

“Let’s work quick,” Leia says, as the _Falcon_ settles down. “We don’t know how close behind us the Imperials are, and I don’t want to hang around and find out.”

“Sure thing, Your Worshipfulness,” Han mutters. He doesn’t like being given orders.

The ambush goes off without a hitch, which makes Din suspicious given what kind of day they’ve had so far, but Leia seems skeptical enough of good luck for the both of them, so he leaves the worrying to her. Wandell tries to deny their accusations at first, leading to a tense standoff between his passengers and the contingent from the _Falcon_ , but then they call Luke down off the ship -- hobbling, leaning on Artoo -- and Wandell shifts tack quickly to begging for his life and swearing he’ll be heinously tortured if they leave him behind for his friends the Imps to deal with. Leia, while she clearly has no love for sniveling traitors, decides that they’re going to use Wandell to pass along some misinformation, and has him comm his handler to tell them the Rebels are heading in the opposite direction from where they’re _actually_ heading -- which is Hoth.

Din’s never much liked the cold -- frost forming on his beskar means he has to wear extra layers underneath it to keep it from cold-burning his skin, and the straps get very tight -- but Luke, who grew up in temperatures averaging upwards of one hundred degrees, hates the cold with a vengeance.

“Hell,” he muttered, the first time they were sent to Hoth to scope out locations for a new base. “This is hell.”

It won’t be until much later, returning to Tatooine with a child in tow and his dyad long since lost, that Din will realize Luke had meant that literally, that for the desert-dwellers of Tatooine hell was not a place of fire and heat but of flat, endless cold.

Now, since Luke is pale with bloodloss _and_ chattering like a leaf in the icy hangar, Din wraps him in a thick wool blanket from one of the _Falcon’s_ bunks and leaves him tucked against Chewie’s side while he goes to find the quartermaster for their berth assignment. While Han’s back is turned, the wookiee helps him filch one of the _Falcon’s_ space heaters, and Din grabs some more blankets from the _Razor Crest_ , which is still packed full of medical supplies, waiting to be unloaded, and by the time he gets Luke to their berth, it’s warm enough that the walls are slick with melting ice.

“I’m not an _invalid_ ,” Luke protests, as Din helps him into bed.

“Sure you’re not.”

“I had worse injuries than this racing speeders at Tosche Station.”

Din knows that. He knows, logically, that Luke is a powerful jedi and an ace pilot and that they’re fighting a war, that in the grand scheme of things a bump to the head and a wrenched shoulder are not cause for this much concern, but something in his animal hindbrain is still leaning over the edge of that platform, thinking, _He’s dead._ He wants to put his hands all over Luke, check every inch of him to make sure he’s all still there, because the thought that he could’ve plunged to his death without Din ever -- without ever…

Luke watches quietly as Din pulls the room’s single chair over to the bed and sits down. He watches quietly as Din tries to pull his mind together, searching for the words that go with what he wants to say. He watches quietly, and then, when it’s too much, he says, “I’m okay, Din. Really.”

“I know,” Din says honestly.

“Then what -- “

“I want you to know what I look like.”

In the silence that follows his statement, Din swallows, suddenly nervous. He thinks he didn’t know what he was going to say until it was already out of his mouth, but he realizes now that he means it. He means it.

Luke, who teases him about how he drinks his coffee and how often he polishes his armor and the fact that he didn’t know the name for a muja fruit, the first time he saw one in the canteen, has never teased him about the things that matter. And he doesn’t now.

He only says, giving Din an out if he wants one, “You don’t have to.”

“I want to,” Din says.

“Okay,” Luke says softly. “Come over here, then.”

Din scooches his chair closer to the bed, so Luke can reach him. His heart is thundering in his chest like it only ever does when Luke is close to him, touching him -- his pulserate never goes much above eighty even in a fight, but with Luke it skyrockets. It makes this feel dangerous, terrifying, Luke extracting his hands from the nest of blankets to set them on Din’s shoulders, and Din doesn’t feel that he can hang onto himself for balance, so he grabs on tight to Luke’s waist instead. Luke moves his hands to Din’s helmet, a gentle pressure on either side. His eyes flick to Din’s viser once, checking in, and whatever he sees must reassure him, because in the next moment he lifts the helmet from Din’s head.

Din’s not sure what he expects. No one has looked at his face since he was ten years old, decades ago.

But Luke only sets the helmet aside, eyes locked with Din’s, and smiles, as if to say, _There you are_.

There’s an intimacy to this that Din had forgotten -- having someone’s eyes on your bare skin. Meeting someone’s gaze without the filter of a pane of transparisteel. Luke sets his hand carefully on the side of Din’s face, thumb brushing over his cheek, and somehow even after all these years without the comfort of touch, it’s not the skin contact that makes Din feel as if he might fall apart, but the fond focus of Luke’s gaze, like he’s looking past Din’s face to his soul.

“Hey,” Luke murmurs, and Din can’t help it anymore -- he takes Luke’s head in his hands and brings their foreheads together in a clumsy, desperate press.

Luke smiles -- a fleeting, helpless smile -- and holds Din in return. This close, his pale eyelashes are very long, and his lips are very pink, and longing takes hold of Din with such intensity that he doesn’t think before he says, “Can I -- “

Luke kisses him before he can finish.

Din makes a sound he doesn’t recognize, deep and breathy, and falls forward into him. Luke catches his weight, sighing, his lips opening under Din’s, and Din licks over the soft inside of his mouth without really knowing what he’s doing, just that he wants to get closer in any way he can -- any way Luke will let him.

Din has never been kissed before, and in that moment he’s glad for it, because here with Luke it feels as if he’s inventing something, discovering it for the first time -- as if they are the first two people in the galaxy to think, _I care for you so deeply that I want to taste your tongue, that I want to have your spit in my mouth and to know you have mine in yours --_ as if Din is the first man to run his gloved hands through another man’s hair, to trail open-mouthed kisses down the side of his neck, guided by nothing else but a natural desire to _know,_ in every way, that which he loves.

He fumbles the straps of his armor and leaves it in a pile on the ground, forgetting, for once, the ritual. Luke smooths his hands over Din’s bare shoulders and rolls Din on top of him in the nest of blankets, still mostly clothed, and they both seem to reach the limits of their confidence at once.

“I’ve never,” Luke admits -- starts to admit, at least, but Din is shaking his head gratefully and saying, “Me neither,” and they share quiet laughter in the space between their faces.

And then they’re kissing again, Luke biting at the thin skin beneath Din’s jaw, his hands sunk in Din’s curls, and Din feels as if he’s caught fire -- his whole body is hot in the strangest places, his abdomen and the backs of his knees and the hollows behind his ears, and he rolls his hips down against Luke’s and feels how hard Luke is and makes a sound without meaning to, a low, rumbling moan. “ _Din,”_ Luke says, _“kriffing --_ do that again,” so he does, Luke making tiny breathy sounds against his open mouth, clinging to him with arms and legs, and then abruptly they both remember what they’ve seen in holovids and Luke pushes Din’s pants down around his thighs while Din opens Luke’s fly, and their cocks slide together unimpeded by fabric.

Din buries his face in Luke’s neck, Luke’s fingers tightening to fists in his hair, and rolls his hips, and rolls his hips, and in a matter of seconds it’s all over -- Luke’s whole body going tense as he comes between their stomachs, the feeling of his cock twitching feather-light against Din’s enough to send him tumbling over after.

They laugh more in the aftermath, tangled close and sweaty beneath a blanket that Din is never _, never_ giving back to Han. “We’ll get better at that,” Luke swears, and Din is so happy that he can only hum, smile tucked into Luke’s cheek, and agree.

**XIII.** _Personal correspondence, Obi-Wan Kenobi to Anakin Skywalker. Recovered by Alderaanian Royal Library._

“Anakin,

“I know that I am meant to be the unflappable master. I know that I am meant to guide you, and act as an example of what a jedi should be, and not burden you with my own concerns. But the truth is that we are equals -- fated, Force-ordained…

“These past few weeks, existing joylessly and singularly in the constant darkness of this world, I have doubted the Jedi Order in ways I never thought myself capable of -- not even when I was rejected by every master and sent to the Agri Corps. I am ashamed to admit that my doubt does not come from a place of moral outrage, nor even from worry for my men, but from a simple place of wanting you. Wanting you beside me on the battlefield, wanting you teasing me after a close call in the medbay, wanting you in my bed during the long periods of _sameness_ that pass for night on Umbara. I worry that my men are beginning to sense that something is wrong -- I feel as if I’ve been left in zero-G for long months without respite; as if the sun which the planet of my soul orbits around has up and disappeared, and I curse you for ever finding that dusty old book, for making it possible for us to be so far apart.

“You are the first thing I reach for in the morning and the last thing I reach for at night, though I can barely feel our training bond now, and our dyad bond exists only in memory. Sometimes it seems all I can think of is our next meeting, how it will feel to have you close to me once more -- even if we never touch again, I imagine it would be enough simply to know that you are near, though of course that must be the exhaustion talking…

“I’ve never been so afraid of anything so much as I’m afraid that I’ll catch a stray blaster bolt before we get a chance to meet again, so in case the worst should come to pass, I’ll tell you everything now. I love you, dear one. I have never loved another. I promised you once, when you were younger, that I would never leave you, not even if you fought and screamed and told me you hated me -- that promise still stands. If I should die tomorrow, I would find some way to watch over you. You are my heart. I know this is not very masterly of me, and I am sorry if this letter brings you pain, but it would be remiss of me not to tell you how deeply and enduringly you are cherished. I am devoted to you, body and soul, from now until the end of time.

“When we meet again -- for we shall meet again, I am sure of it -- I shall endeavor to keep you in bed for a period of no less than six standard days…

“Yours,

“Obi-Wan.”

_Personal correspondence, Anakin Skywalker to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Recovered by Alderaanian Royal Library._

“Master,

“These days are the longest of my life. I can only pray that they’ll be over soon, so that we can get quickly to those six days in bed. The things I want to do to you don’t bear writing about -- remember that time in Canto Bight? I want to do that. Over, and over, and over…

“Please, always, write to me with your worries. I want to feel like we’re equals -- I know we are, I know what you’ve said, but sometimes I still feel like your padawan.

“This, however, may be a bad example, because all I can tell you is that I love you too, I miss you too. You are my heart, Obi-Wan, and sometimes I can barely think for wanting you.

“Yours, always, in every way yours,

“Anakin.”

**XIV.** Over the long frozen months on Hoth, they get better at sex. Din thinks there’s something about freezing air and constant snow that’s somehow conducive to it -- to lovemaking. Everyone in the base is lethargic, easy with long conversations and early nights and abundant drink, like their bodies want to surrender to hibernation, and no one notices that he and Luke spend hours each day wrapped around each other in their berth, learning each other’s bodies the way they’ve spent the last year learning each other’s hearts and minds. Returning to their bed after a day patrolling out in the ice, Din begins to associate the feeling of warmth with Luke, with how the muscles of Luke’s sides jump under his fingertips and how the muscles of his legs jump under his lips and how Luke says _Din_ over and over urgently when he’s about to come.

It’s still strange, not wearing his helmet around another person -- knowing that Luke can see every expression he makes. But he feels like he’s relaxing into it, letting the tension out of his neck, having fewer and fewer of those moments where he realizes suddenly, with a jolt, that he’s smiling like a dope and that Luke can see it. Luke, to his eternal credit, takes to this new idiosyncratic part of Din like it’s normal, like he doesn’t mind at all -- and maybe he doesn’t. Maybe it doesn’t bother him at all to have Din just smiling dopily while he watches him make toast, to bonk heads with him in the morning because Din’s not used to having so much peripheral vision, to help Din re-learn how to talk and eat at the same time, sitting opposite him at the table that they’ve built out of spare crates.

Word gets around, somehow, that they’re sleeping together, and though the true depth of their relationship seems to go unnoticed Din at least enjoys that there are less men who want -- or at least less of a concerted effort -- to get Luke naked over strip sabacc. He hears Luke’s friends sometimes giving him flak about _the old ball and chain,_ and he gets some of the same pfassk from Cara, jokes about war widows and your buddies starting to look real good when you’ve been stuck in space for long enough, but they’re hardly the only ones who’ve shacked up on Hoth, so mostly everyone leaves them alone about it. Oddly enough, it’s _Artoo_ who sees what’s going on most clearly -- [your dad was a dyad,] Din hears him telling Luke in the kitchen one morning. [your dad and his master, obi-wan kenobi.]

 _“Ben?”_ Luke asks, incredulous. “But what about -- ? I mean, during the war, they weren’t always…”

[anakin found a way,] Artoo beeps, disapproving. [karking idiot. if i ever have to carry another love letter -- ]

“How?” Luke interrupts, suddenly laser-focused. “Artoo, you have to tell me -- “

[no karking way. did you hear what i just said about love letters?]

Luke looks like he wants to argue more, then, brandishing a wooden spoon at the droid, but then he notices Din in the door and snaps his mouth shut. He looks guilty for a second, like he’s hiding something, but Din forgets to ask what it is because Luke pulls him inside, sets his helmet on the table, and draws him into a long, warm kiss.

Six months in, the soldiers are starting to go stir crazy, but they haven’t been under enemy fire since they’ve arrived and the reprieve has done wonders for the collective health of their outfit. The psychologist, Dr. Janrav’jan, confesses to Din and Cara over drinks one night that she was _this close_ \-- holding two of her tentacles very close together -- to having to prescribe neurotrops to half the army. “I know,” she says, into the stunned quiet. “I know -- that’s the sort of pfassk the Imperials do, not us. But half of Gold Squadron came back with shellshock after that botched supply run to Jakku, and I had at least eleven active cases of Ganzer syndrome. I’ll admit it wouldn’t have been ideal, asking men to turn off their emotions so they could keep going, but it was looking like it would either be that or let half the army go catatonic.”

Luke, over in the corner with Han and a few of the pilots from Rogue Squadron, is laughing at something, his face orange in the light from the tabletop heater, eyes bright.

Next to Din, Cara snaps, “I’d rather be dead than on neurotrops. You should lose your karking license.”

Dr. Janrav’jan clears her throat, says her goodnights and leaves politely, but she’s rattled. Din can’t blame her -- Cara’s scary when she’s mad, and right now she looks karking furious. “Sorry,” she tells him, still fuming. “I just -- “

“No need to apologize,” Din assures her.

She nods once, grip white-knuckled on her flagon of ale. For the rest of the night neither of them says a word, taking comfort in the noise of revelry and friendship and happiness but not participating, until Luke comes to drag Din to bed.

In the long, dark nights -- longer, here, than any other planet Din’s visited -- Luke traces patterns on Din’s skin, laying with his arms folded on Din’s chest, and tells him things: stories about growing up on Tatooine, shooting womprats for target practice and the time Wedge Antilles stepped in quicksand and how one time him and Biggs and Camie Marstrap got it in their heads to build a podracer and nearly blew Tosche Station off the map, meandering explanations of what it’s like to be able to feel the Force, the interconnectedness of all living things, like a river running through the whole galaxy. He tells Din -- small, embarrassed, like a confession, that he still misses his aunt and uncle, that sometimes all he wants, more than peace and more than Din, sorry, is to come home and smell Aunt Beru’s cooking.

Din’s never been much for talking, especially not with the fast and easy honesty that Luke gives him, but he does his best to give something back, because he’s never loved someone like this, and he wants to do a good job of it. He tells Luke some about being a foundling, about how Paz trained him and how he and the other foundlings lived, how as children they were allowed to eat meals communally around a large table because they didn’t wear helmets yet, and how that was always the happiest part of the day for him, like eating dinner with his family. He tells Luke about his first war, on Geonosis, and his second, and about how he got each piece of his suit, jobs that earned him bars of beskar to be melted down in his covert’s forge. He tells him about his covert, struggling to put into words the sense of home that went beyond place, that followed him wherever he went, as if he could carry things like loyalty and belonging with him as surely as he could carry his rifle, and about the day he returned to find them gone without a trace.

He tells him, haltingly, things that he has never voiced aloud to another living soul -- memories of his mother, things from a life he barely remembers that he’s never allowed himself to miss, but which he recalls in the safety of their bed with a deep, nauseating grief that moves him to tears.

Luke turns out the light with a flick of the Force, because he knows Din feels safer in the dark, where not even Luke can see his face, and murmurs comfort-words that mean nothing and lets Din hold onto him tight enough to bruise.

“I love you,” Luke says in the dark, and Din clutches him close and can only nod.

Early in month seven, Leia decides that they need more space and forms a construction contingent to carve out more tunnels into the ice. Din and Cara get assigned to one of the rotations with a bunch of pilots, hotshots who think they’re too good to be relegated to ‘mole duty’ and cut corners at a rate that’s going to get one of them killed -- either by cave-in or by Cara.

Din’s digging out a ventilation shaft barely wide enough for him to fit in, melting the ice away in front of him, when the floor goes out from under him and he drops in a rain of ice blocks as big as his head.

He’ll find out later, after he wakes up, that one of the pilots got the bright idea to rush ahead with digging the tunnel under Din without without waiting to check the integrity of the ice under the vent shaft, a move which collapsed three levels of the build at once and set them back a week.

But in the moment, all he knows is the sudden drop -- and then he’s out like a light.

He wakes up two days later in medbay.

Even before he’s fully conscious, he can tell his whole body is one big bruise, and that moving is going to hurt a hell of a lot. There are bio-sensors stuck to his face, and he reaches up in a panic, stomach in his throat, to make sure he’s still wearing his helmet. He is, but then _how_ \--

“Luke put them on,” says a voice beside him.

He looks over. Cara is sitting at his bedside, legs up on a medcart, looking like she’s been there a while. “They wanted to put you in the tank, but he swore you’d rather be in pain than have them see your face.”

“He was right,” Din croaks. “Where is he? Luke.”

Cara doesn’t answer, but the look on her face is answer enough.

Din finds Leia and Chewie standing just inside the closed blast doors, Chewie’s arm wrapped tight around her shoulders. “He should have been close,” she says, voice distant, as Din limps up next to her. “He should’ve been just outside. I thought your tether was only a hundred yards.”

“It is,” Din says, bewildered. His voice feels like a pebble in his throat, like it might turn into tears at any moment, but he swallows and makes himself ask, “He’s out there alone?”

Leia shakes her head, never taking her eyes away from the doors. “Han went out after him.”

“I’m sure he found him,” Din says, though he isn’t. “The snow probably just grounded their ship -- “

“He didn’t take a ship,” Leia says.

“What?”

She glances at him, then away. “He didn’t take a ship. He took a tauntaun.”

Din stares at her for a long minute, too dumbfounded to speak, then joins her in watching the closed blast doors. Once they close at night, he knows, they don’t open until morning. Even if stepping outside wouldn’t kill him -- they’re frozen shut.

He keeps vigil with Leia and Chewie in the hangar bay that night, not talking much, the night-shift skeleton crew moving carefully around them. One pilot -- Shara, Din thinks her name is -- comes over and lights a votive candle on the ground just inside the doors, then sits with them for a little while until another pilot, Kes, comes over with cups of instant tea. Leia drinks hers in small, delicate sips, her hands shaking, and Din is so cold and aching and fighting such a massive upwelling of despair that tips his helmet up to his nose and drinks his, too. Leia doesn’t comment, and neither does Kes, even though his eyes flicker over Din’s lips, his chin, and for the first time since he signed onto the Alliance Din feels that he might be part of something that’s bigger than just him and Luke, like these people have become brothers to him like the rest of his covert are brothers to him.

Din forces himself not to think of his tether, of how it’s apparently stretched farther right now than it’s ever been. He forces himself not to think of what that might mean, even though he knows that avoiding thinking of the possibility now will only make it more painful if it comes to pass.

The last time he saw Luke was in the canteen. He squeezed his shoulder, he remembers, but he didn’t say anything to him on his way past.

He should have stopped. Bent their heads close together. Said something.

_I love you, too._

When Kes goes, he promises Leia that he’ll wake the rest of Green Squadron so that they’re ready to head out as soon as the doors un-freeze to look for Luke and Han. Leia thanks him softly, and with that the relative safety of the middle of the night seems to dissipate -- in these tense, vigil hours, Luke has been neither alive nor dead, but the moment they start looking, the truth will swing one of two ways, and for better or for worse, it will all be over.

Din doesn’t go out with any of the ships, and neither does Leia -- there’s no telling which scout will find them, so the fastest way to get to them, antithetical as it feels, is to stay put. They get the call after only an hour of searching, Zeg Senesca from Rogue Group over a secure channel, “ _We’ve got ’em, Commander! Alive and well!”_

A cheer goes up in the command center.

Din’s knees go out, but while he’s on his way down to the floor Leia jams her short body under his arm and guides him over to a crate, where they sink down leaning against each other. “They’re okay,” Leia says, laughing. “They’re okay.”

Ten minutes later, she’s biting Han’s head off as two medics race Luke through the hangar bay on a gurney. Din hears _What were you thinking, you nerf-herder?!_ and _What the kark is that smell?!_ and Han yelling back _What did you want me to do, Your Worshipfulness -- leave him out there to die?!_ and then he’s plunging into the low-ceilinged halls after Luke, jogging to keep up with his gurney.

“ _Luke!”_ he calls after the medics. “ _Luke!_ Is he -- “

“He’s alive!” one of the medics shouts back, not stopping. “We need to get him in bacta!”

Wedge Antilles stops Din outside the door to the medbay -- or he tries to, anyway, but in the end it takes him and Darklighter and Kes Dameron all working together, until one of the medics sticks her head out the door and shrieks, “What the pfassk is all that noise?!”

She sees Din, struggling against six arms, and softens. “Oh, alright. Come in -- just don’t touch anything.”

Din paces in the back of the medbay while the medics and the droids cut Luke out of his clothes and maneuver him into the bacta tank. Luke is limp, his skin a tapestry of cuts and bruises and frostbite, and the sight of him makes something turn over in Din’s chest like a storm turning over the seabed -- guilt, sadness, directionless anger. He wants to go to him, touch him and feel that he’s okay, but he knows that he’d only be getting in the way and that the best thing to do is let the medics work, so instead he just watches Luke plunge into bacta, surrounded by tiny bubbles, and grips end of his cape hard enough to hurt his fingers.

It feels like hours, but it must be only a matter of minutes before the activity dies down, the medics return to their other patients, and Din is left alone in front of the bacta tank with the one who let him inside. She glances up from her bio-scanner and says, “You’re Djarin, right? Luke’s roommate?”

“Dyad,” Din croaks, without thinking.

She blinks. “What?”

“I’m his dyad. Not just his roommate.”

“Oh,” she says. “I’m -- I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

Din nods tightly.

After that, the medic -- whose name turns out to be Primir -- talks to Din in an even, calming voice, going over Luke’s vitals, heartrate and blood pressure and oxygen levels and percentage of skin covered by ice burns, assuring him after each item, _that’s going up already_ , or _totally normal for someone who’s that hypothermic._ More than anything that’s happened in the last twelve hours, it’s that small act of kindness that moves Din to tears, and he can only nod, blinking rapidly behind the shield of his helmet, because to speak would betray how completely he’s lost control of himself.

When Primir is finished, she brings Din a medcart to sit on and makes herself scarce. He sits, one hand spread out on the curved wall of the tank, and watches Luke float. He doesn’t look like himself, in there, and not just because of the tubes in his mouth and the clamp on his nose. He looks…troubled. Not at all like he’s sleeping.

Artoo joins him eventually, and then Leia, Han, Chewie.

Han talks, at first, bitching about how he’s not going to get the tauntaun-guts smell out of his hair for the rest of his life, but instead of the cutting remark Din expects from Leia (something along the lines of _can’t be worse than how you already smell_ ), Chewie shoves Han in the shoulder, and he shuts up.

They sit in silence after that, until they’re each called away, first Leia by the command center, then Artoo by that stars-damned protocol droid, then Han and Chewie by Shara Bey who says Wedge has got it in his head that he can fix that busted carburetor on the _Falcon_ , until Din is alone again, watching over the man he loves.

He falls asleep there, helmet resting against the tank. When he wakes it’s to Primir shaking his shoulder gently. “Hey,” she says, “it’s time to pull him out. You might want to step outside for this. It’s not pretty.”

Din, of course, stays.

Primir was right to warn him. It’s not pretty. They pull the tube out of Luke’s throat and he retches bile and bacta and snot, curled on his side on the slimy exam table. Din wants to kneel beside him, hold his hands, but there are six medics and three droids all gathered around him, taking vitals and making sure the tank did what it was supposed to, so he clenches his hands into fists and hangs back until they start cleaning him off, at which point he says, “Wait, let me.” Primir gives him a knowing look, drops a towel in his hands, and herds the rest of the medics out of the way.

Luke’s coughing -- a wet, awful sound. Din holds his shoulder and mops his face with the towel, clearing bacta and mucus away from his chin, his neck. Luke’s fingers dig into his shoulders, shivering like a newborn, and when the second round of coughing starts, Din abandons the towel and holds him with an arm around his center, uncaring that he’s getting god knows what all over his armor.

“Kark, that hurts,” Luke rasps, when the coughing stops.

Din cradles the back of his head. “Breathe,” he says. He tries to sound soothing, but he’s not sure he manages it. Terror and relief have turned his whole body into jelly. “Just breathe, Luke, you’re okay. I’ve got you.”

Naked and slimy as a newborn, Luke matches the rhythm of his lungs to Din’s, and breathes.

They keep him six more days for observation in medbay. Artoo stays with him, most of the time; Din’s back on construction duty, and even though the pilots have more or less fallen into line, chastened by having almost killed a guy, the added flight activity in the search for Luke and Han has forced Leia to add patrols to make sure they weren’t spotted, so they’re working at half the manpower.

The days are long, and the nights are rough. Din spends the first one slumped in a chair in medbay, but when Luke wakes up and finds him like that he insists Din go back to their bed.

“I’ll be out in no time,” he assures him, forehead pressed to Din’s freezing helmet. “It’s touching that you want to keep vigil at my sickbed, but you’re gonna kark your back up if you sleep in that chair again.”

After a week, Luke’s done enough strategic whining that Primir discharges him to sleep in his own berth. Din comes home to find him deep in conversation with Artoo over some holoscan text in a language Din doesn’t read. He still doesn’t speak enough droid to know what Artoo’s saying, beyond _no idea_ and _Force-sensitive_ and _side effects_ , and Luke waves for him to shut the holoscan down as soon as he spots Din, anyways.

Din’s going to ask him what it’s about, and ask him how their tether got so long -- he really, really is. But right now Luke’s watching him take his armor off with heavy, half-lidded eyes, his wet pink lips slightly parted, and Din knows that in the grand scheme of things a week isn’t that long, but it’s more than a week, actually, it’s nine days that he’s been missing half of himself, even if he spent two of them unconscious.

They figured out blowjobs a little while ago in a midday stroke of inspiration, and now Din presses Luke back into the nest of blankets and noses into the crease of Luke’s hip, humming, and forgets all about asking questions.

 _Tomorrow,_ he promises himself. _Tomorrow, I’ll get some answers._

They’re woken in the middle of the night by a red alert.

In the chaos of racing to stations, Din catches Luke on his way to their door with one leg in his flight suit and pulls him into a short, bracing kiss. “I love you,” he says.

Luke holds his gaze, strangely serious. “I love you, too.”

Part of Din must know, then, that something is wrong, but he doesn’t pursue it. There’s no time.

Once their snowspeeder goes down beneath the mammoth, crushing feet of the AT-AT, Din loses track of Luke. He spots him for a split second, dangling from the belly of the machine, lightsaber a bright burn of blue, but then another snowspeeder goes down behind him and he has to race to pull the pilot and the gunner -- Shara and Kes -- from the wreckage before it’s flattened under the AT-AT’s next step. By the time they’re staggering clear, up a hill of snow, the AT-AT that Luke was hanging from has crashed to the ground, and Luke is nowhere to be seen.

“ _Where’s Luke?”_ Shara shouts, over the noise.

 _“There!”_ Kes exclaims, before Din can answer. He’s pointing to a tiny figure on the vast field of white -- Luke, lightsaber still out, running towards their defensive line.

Shara squeezes Din’s arm. “He’ll make it back okay. We’ve got to get out of here.”

They do, dodging enemy fire as they skid down the side of the hill, back towards the base. Din doesn’t have his rifle, but he manages to take down a few pursuing snowtroopers with his handgun, and Shara gets one with a well-placed hunk of ice. By the time they make it to the base -- leaping down into the defensive trenches and winding their way down and back to safety -- the only ships left in the hangar are the _Falcon_ and the _Razor Crest._

Chewie comes down the ramp to the _Falcon_ , armed with his bowcaster, and roars in greeting when he spots Din.

“Luke?” Din asks.

“The kid left!” shouts Han, jogging up behind him, Leia practically tucked under his arm like a nuna ball. “Took Artoo and the X-wing. You’ll get the hell out of here too, if you know what’s good for you.”

He wrestles Leia up the ramp into the _Falcon_ , Chewie following. Din is left standing in the hangar bay feeling like he just took a shot and missed the mark by a mile. Luke _left?_ Left _how?_ And _why?_

“Djarin!” Kes calls, from the _Crest._ “Come on, we gotta get out of here! Whole damn place is coming down!”

He’s right -- heavy artillery impacts the base from the outside, and a whole chunk of ceiling falls away, crashing into a stack of crates mere feet from where Din’s standing.

Din races back to the ship.

Shara’s already at the controls, and he doesn’t protest as she brings them out of the base and into the hostile airspace above Hoth. The upper atmo is swarming with TIE fighters, but most of them seem to be going after the _Falcon;_ Kes radios to see if they need help, and Han tells him to go kriff himself, to which Kes says happy flying and kriff you too, Solo. Shara takes them to hyperspace just as the TIE fighters notice them, whooping with relief.

Din doesn’t notice any of it. He’s down in the cargo hold, sitting on the floor of his sleeping nook. His hammock is gone. So is the sling he used to have on the wall, where he hung his helmet. This ship hasn’t really been _his_ in almost two years -- half the stuff in the hold is Alliance property, extra medkits and skeins of fabric too thin for Hoth that the quartermaster stashed in here when they ran out of space in their office, ammo for guns no one carries that Leia insisted they keep. _Never know what you might need,_ she’d said, and Din agreed. There’s a puffy yellow jacket in here, too. Luke’s jacket. The one he’s so sentimental about that he keeps it vacuum-packed and rolled up in one of Artoo’s storage panels, just in case they have to move fast and he doesn’t have time to remember where it is.

Luke didn’t leave this here by accident. Din knew that as soon as he spotted it. And now he _knows_ , because there’s a scrap of paper in the inside pocket, a note scrawled in Luke’s awful, chickenscratch handwriting.

_I’m sorry. There’s something I have to do, something about being a jedi, and you can’t come with me. I didn’t tell you cause I knew you’d argue. Don’t worry about me. I’m okay. I’ll be home soon. You are my heart. Luke._

‘Soon,’ Din’s going to find out, can be a very long time indeed.

**XV.** _Excerpts from the private journals of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Recovered by Luke Skywalker on Tatooine, 4ABY_.

“I wonder, sometimes, if I should not have killed Anakin on Mustafar. It is a useless thing to wonder, I know, but the lonely winds on this planet seem to encourage useless wonderings. I could have easily done it. A half-inch adjustment in my swing, and I’d have slashed him through the heart. It would have been more painful for me, I think, but less painful for the galaxy -- and for Anakin. I promised him once that, even if he told me he hated me, I would never leave him -- and now I have. Now I have left him in his most grievous hour of need, for the sake of his wife and children…”

“Qui-Gon came to me today. He insists now that I call him Qui-Gon, not Master, as I am nearly as old now as he was when he died, and because, to quote him, ‘a man’s achievements do not transcend death, my dear padawan; we are all equal in the Force.’ Why I am still a padawan when he is not a master, I will never know. This morning I was not in the mood for cryptic spiritual guidance, so as he followed me out to the vaporator, I asked him if he had ever heard of a dyad where one part fell, but not the other. He had not. He attempted to disguise his lack of knowledge with a long anecdote -- one with which I am already intimately familiar, I might add -- about two fish who swam in the space before time, one light and one dark, who are said on his homeworld to have been the first dyad…”

“I believe we are sharing dreams. It has been almost a decade since I last felt the full strength of our dyad bond, but I worry it may be strengthening again as Vader’s darkside powers come to maturity. What this means for my and Luke’s safety here, I have not yet fully contemplated. Even after everything, I feel as if I am betraying Anakin by not embracing him when he reaches out -- in the confused terror of last night’s dream I could not quell a concurrent wave of joy, that our minds should still feel some affinity, that they should reach out for each other across space. I know that if I should ever see Anakin again I would have to kill him, but the heart doesn’t know what the mind knows; the heart is ignorant…”

“Luke is four today. Beru, Owen and I have agree that this is the last birthday I should attend, that to attend any more might mean Luke would remember me when he was grown. I know it’s the safest decision, but I can’t help but feel as if I’m losing my last connection to Anakin. Luke looks so much like his father. I wonder if Leia looks like Padmé…”

“Tuskens today. I’m not sure I’ll ever get back full use of the arm -- my healing trance was shallow and weak. I shall have to devise a better method for driving them away, as I am apparently very rusty without my lightsaber. Anakin would have some suggestion, I’m sure. I miss him especially…”

“Holonet News broadcast an old speech of Padmé’s today, in honor of the anniversary of her death. I had forgotten how talented she was as an orator. Eloquent, inspiring, strong in her convictions. It feels strange to mourn her alone, as we were never really that close, but though I didn’t know her as a woman, I like to think that I knew her through Anakin -- it is the greatest form of understanding, I think, to know that you love the same thing. I wonder if Anakin saw the broadcast, if he had some part in the selection of the speech; most of the Holonet is dedicated, these days, to Imperial propaganda, enough that I was surprised to recognize Padmé’s face. Does he miss her, I wonder. Does he mourn her. Does he mourn me. My knowledge of Anakin tells me he must, though I must remind myself that Vader is not all Anakin. Vader is also Sidious, and I cannot imagine that a creature such as Sidious is capable of mourning…”

“Illness today. I feel that I am ageing faster than I ought. Perhaps it is the sand. Perhaps it is the solitude. Perhaps it is the missing half of my heart. In my fever last night I called out for Anakin; I imagined I was in medbay aboard the _Resolute,_ that Anakin was at my bedside, running his fingers through my hair…I wonder if he felt me, across the expanse of the cosmos. It felt so real to touch him…”

**XVI.** Din leaves the Rebellion.

He stays for a while, waiting for Luke to come back. The closest he gets in half a year is word, hours too late, that Luke’s on board an EF76 Nebulon-B escort frigate at the edge of the Outer Rim, but by the time he manages to go AWOL from his post on Takodana and make it out there, Wedge -- sympathetic -- tells him Luke and Leia left the day before. He asks where they went, bullies half the communications staff trying to get their comm code, but all they give him is the number for the _Falcon,_ and when he calls he gets someone named Lando who only tells him, terse and annoyed, that they’re on a top-secret mission and can’t risk any correspondence with the fleet.

“Where’s Han?” Din demands, suddenly furious -- Why the hell won’t anyone tell him anything? When did everyone decide he was so untrustworthy? “Let me talk to someone who isn’t a kriffing dumbass -- “

Lando hangs up on him.

Din drops his head in his hands. “Dank farrik,” he mutters.

He’s exhausted. He’s been exhausted for years, and Luke was the only thing that made it better, and now all he has of Luke is a yellow jacket hanging in his sleeping nook and a hole in his chest the size of a man.

Cara leaves too, driven past her tolerance by a new policy of prescribing neurotrops to those who want them. When Din asks her if she wants to join the Guild with him, she just laughs.

“I don’t think so, sleemo,” she says. “I’m finding somewhere to kick my feet up for a while. Stiff drinks, loose women…you know what I’m talking about.”

Din does, though he doesn’t think he’s cut out for relaxation. If he stopped moving he’d start thinking, so instead he gets himself a shiny new Guild membership -- his old one lapsed while he was off playing soldier -- and starts collecting bounties again. It’s better, he figures, than haunting the halls of every Rebel base in the galaxy hoping that Luke will show up. There’s still their dyad bond, if Luke ever decides he wants to find him.

He hangs around the Kastolar sector for a while taking nickle and dime jobs and not thinking about how he only picked this region so he’d be close to Tatooine, as if that mattered. He looks into Lando Calrissian and finds out he’s the former governor of a mining colony on Bespin that fell under the occupation of the Emperor a few days after Luke went missing, but he’s not sure how that fits into anything, what it tells him. Once, in the middle of the night, he gets a comm request from Leia -- “How do you unfreeze someone from carbonite?” she wants to know.

Din, wearing only his helmet and his shorts, blinks at the holo-form of her face. “What? There’s a button on the side of the casket, but why do you -- “

“Thanks,” she says, and starts to hang up.

“Wait!” Din clutches the comm, like that will make her stay. “Wait, Leia. Please. Tell me what happened. Tell me Luke’s okay. Tell me anything. Something.”

Leia regards him for a long moment, eyes hard in the flickering blue light. “He’s alive,” she says, at last. “I can’t tell you more than that, Din, I’m sorry.”

She ends the call, and her image disappears.

Din thinks he feels Luke at night sometimes, in the claustrophobic dark of his sleeping nook, but he can’t be sure. He’ll wake with the vague impression of fingertips on his skin, a body curled up next to his in his hammock, Luke’s voice in his ear murmuring _I’m sorry, I love you,_ an alien feeling of warmth beneath his breastbone that lingers all day, like Luke’s reached out across the cosmos to remind him, and Din never voices the thought to anyone because he doesn’t have anyone to voice it to, but in the confines of his own head it sounds fantastical, ridiculous. Not even someone like Luke can do that.

He collects his bounties. He puts his credits in a safe on the _Razor Crest_ and wonders what he’s saving them for, other than gas and ration bars, so he can keep going. He paces the confines of the cargo hold with his helmet off and misses the touch of Luke’s gaze on his skin and wonders if he looks as old as he feels. He moves from the Kastolar sector to Halla to Bortele to Bryz to Talcene and does not admit to himself that he’s looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found. He hears about the end of the war in a canteen in the Maltorian mining belt, and loses the pirate he’s tailing because he’s too busy watching the _HNN_ feed of the second Death Star over Endor and wondering if Luke’s there, if he’s safe, if he had some hand in all this. He takes jobs cleaning up Imperial remnants on a half dozen worlds and stops expecting every time he looks at the horizon that Luke’s going to appear. He keeps Luke where he keeps his covert, now. Where he keeps his mother. Where he keeps home.

He doesn’t take his helmet off in front of another living being for five years.

And then on Nevarro, Greef Karga says, _No puck. Face to face. Direct commission. Deep pocket._

**XVII.** On Sorgan, Din barely takes two steps inside the common house before a familiar voice shouts, “Din Djarin?!”

He turns, staring in disbelief. “ _Cara?_ ”

As coincidences go, it’s a pretty kriffing big one, but Din’s had a rough enough few days that he’s not in any position to look a gift bantha in the mouth. Cara fawns over the child, and buys them all a hot meal, and the only reference either of them make to their time in the Rebellion is Cara asking once, gently, _Still no Skywalker? --_ to which Din can only shake his head, tight-lipped, because to talk about it after all this time would push him over a precipice. Later, they’re hired to defend a krill-farming village, and it feels good fighting with Cara at his back, even though she’s not the person he most wants there. When it’s over and Omera invites him to stay, Din only thinks about it for a second -- but he _does_ think about it. He could stay here. He could be at peace here, if not ever really _happy_ , and the child would be safe, but in the last five years he’s never slowed down long enough for the pain of loss to catch up with him, and he’s not about to start now.

Cara still doesn’t come with him, but she smiles ruefully as he boards his ship and says, “You know where to find me if you need me, Djarin. I’m not going anywhere.”

And that, Din thinks, means more to him than she can ever know.

**XVIII.** _You are my heart,_ Luke had written. _I’ll be home soon. I’m sorry._

Din believed it when he read it. But it’s been a long five years. And it’s hard for confidence to weather silence.

The child is like Luke, Din discovers -- a jedi. Din thinks sometimes that he loves the child more because of that, because he looks at the kid and sees a phantom of the man he loves. How the child’s eyes slide half-closed in concentration when he uses the Force, whether he’s healing Din’s scrapes or stealing cookies. How he’s still capable of such pure, honest joy even after all the horrors he’s seen, like when they rescued a ship full of kids on their way to stormtrooper school, kids who’d seen their parents slaughtered and been stolen from their beds, and Luke had sat cross-legged on the floor of the cargo hold with them and let them braid flowers in his hair, smiling and laughing and singing along tentatively as they taught him songs, and it hadn’t been faked -- his gentle happiness -- but that night he’d buried his face in Din’s chest and clung to him and cried and cried. Luke would love the child as much as Din does -- and he would know how to love him better, because they’re the same.

 _Come back,_ Din tries to hold in his mind when he’s falling asleep at night, hoping nonsensically, insanely, that Luke will hear him. _Help me. I don’t know how to do this. You left and I forgot how._

But Luke never answers.

Karga sends word when Din’s in Mos Pelgo that there’s a man on Nevarro looking for him, a ‘real mysterious type with a very dramatic cloak.’ “My contacts say he’s been following you all over the sector,” Karga cautions, his holo-image wan and serious. “But no one can say who he is, or where he came from. Guy’s a ghost.”

Din figures it’s just one more person after the child and doesn’t think much of it, other than to add ‘dramatic cloak’ to his list of things to look over his shoulder for.

But then he meets the jedi on Corvus -- Ahsoka Tano, who wears a dark cloak and tells him, when he asks, that it used to be the uniform of her people, the Jedi Order. And he thinks, _What if._

Watching Ahsoka fight opens a wound in Din’s chest that he hadn’t realized had closed. She’s better-trained than Luke ever was, when Din knew him, fast and light on her feet, and Din thinks he’d be very scared of her if she weren’t on his side. The night they spend in the woods, she tells him the child’s name is _Grogu_ and that he thinks of Din as his father -- and later, when the child’s asleep, she asks him, “You’re part of a dyad, aren’t you?”

Din’s heart drops into his stomach. He’s grateful for the protection of his helmet as he says, “Yes. I was.”

“There’s no ‘was’ with dyads,” Ahsoka tells him. “My master was part of a dyad, with his own master. When he fell, during the Clone Wars, he committed a genocide against our people. He killed the younglings in Grogu’s creche.” Here she pauses, gazing fondly, sadly at the child, asleep in the light of the dancing flames, then continues, softer than before, “If that sort of sin can’t break a dyad, nothing can.”

Din swallows, throat thick with emotions he hasn’t let himself feel in a long time. “Your masters,” he says. “Did they ever…stretch their tether? Go far away from each other?”

Ahsoka smiles knowingly. “All the time.”

“And they found each other again? Afterwards?”

Her smile turns sad. “Always.”

When she sends him to Tython to seek out other jedi, Din thinks again, _What if,_ but then Luke doesn’t come. No one comes. And in the aftermath, the _Razor Crest_ destroyed and his child taken, Din wants Luke back more acutely and more desperately than he’s ever wanted him, because Luke would know what to do -- he would know how to rescue Grogu.

Instead he gets Boba Fett.

“Long time, Djarin,” Fett says, when they’re on board the _Slave I,_ after Tython.

It’s an understatement. The last time Din saw him was before he joined the Alliance, back when Fett asked for help going after Han, when Luke was just a bucket hat and a poncho in Din’s scope. It feels like a lifetime ago, maybe because Din’s such a different person now -- and looking at Fett, at how the years have clearly not been kind to him, he thinks maybe Fett is a different person now, too.

“I thought you were dead,” he says, as Fett pours him and Fennec cups of piss-poor replicated caf. “When I found that marshal wearing your armor…”

“There was a while there I wished I was dead,” Fett says, matter-of-fact. “Han karking Solo kicked me into the karking sarlacc pit. You know what it’s like to be digested alive?”

Din stares at him for a long minute, while the words compute. Then he says, with feeling, _“What?”_

“I finally had him,” Fett continues, joining them at the small table. It rattles as the _Slave I_ passes through hyperspace, but it’s bolted down, and the cups are magnetic. “Had to team up with the Imps to do it, but I got him pinned down on Bespin five or six years ago.”

“The Imps?” Din echoes.

“Yeah, I didn’t like it either, but you know -- business is business. Governor on Cloud City set the whole thing up, acted as an intermediary. I got to keep Solo, in the end. Vader wanted him as bait for some jedi called Skywalker -- “

He doesn’t get to finish, because Din launches himself over the table and gets him in a chokehold.

 _“What happened to Luke?!”_ he demands. “ _What the kark did you do?!”_

Fett’s turning slowly purple, spluttering in Din’s grip, but he holds out a hand to stop Fennec as she goes for her gun. “Kid’s alright,” he chokes out. “He busted Solo out of Jabba’s palace six months later.”

Heart still pounding, Din lets go.

Fett wheezes and rocks back, rubbing his neck. “Kriffing hell, Djarin. Why’s the jedi mean anything to you?”

“He doesn’t,” Din lies.

That night, trying futilely to sleep with his helmet still on in the crew quarters with Fennec, Din’s mind is rushed and clumsy with worry -- for Grogu, for Luke, for things he can’t change. He remembers, now, that strange call he got from Leia, years ago in the middle of the night, asking about carbonite freeze. Was that about Han? Was the ‘top secret mission’ she and Luke were on with Lando about rescuing Han, and if it was, why couldn’t they tell him? Did they think he’d tell Boba Fett? Did they think -- Did _Luke_ think, somehow, that Din would choose another Mandalorian over him? That his allegiance to the Creed was stronger than his devotion to the other half of his soul?

Because if he did, then he was wrong. He was very, very wrong.

The next time they meet -- and Din lets himself think it, for the first time in a long time, that they _are_ going to meet again -- Din’s going to shake Luke hard enough that all the stupid falls out of him, and then he’s going to hold him tighter than he’s ever held anything, and then he’s never, never letting go again.

 _You are my heart,_ he’ll tell him. _You’re home. Don’t apologize. I already forgive you._

**XIX.** For all that he confessed to Luke in the crucible of their berth on Hoth, Din never got around to telling him why he was so opposed to droids. He thinks Luke must have guessed, though, when Din recalled the Separatist raid on Aq Vetina. So it’s fitting that, the first time Din sees his dyad after five years, Luke is saving him from battle droids.

The lightsaber is a different color, and the fighting is smoother, more elegant than what Din remembers, but the moment he sees the dark cape he knows, instinctively, that this is Luke. It was Luke who Karga called to warn him about -- Luke who’s been following him across the galaxy. Luke heard Grogu on the seeing stone, and now he’s here. He came.

He pushes his hood back.

It’s quiet enough on the bridge of Gideon’s destroyer that the sound of Din’s heart is like thunder in his ears. Grogu says _aboo_ , warm and safe in Din’s arms. Din focuses on holding him, because he thinks if he doesn’t have something to focus on he might collapse right there on the floor, and then Bo-Katan will kill him for the Darksaber, and then --

“Din,” Luke says. “You…This is your child?”

Din looks down at Grogu. The child blinks at him, trusting.

“Yes,” he says.

“Oh.” Luke takes a deep breath, then lets it out on a shaky exhale. His eyes flit from Din, to Grogu, to the rest of the people standing on the bridge, like something awful will happen if he doesn’t react fast and make the right choice. “You should both come with me,” he says. His eyes meet Din’s. “Please. Come with me.”

Din glances back at Cara.

She nods once, a small smile on her face.

“Go ahead,” she says. “I’ll take care of this one,” with a kick to Gideon’s side.

Din looks at Bo-Katan. Her eyes are locked on the Darksaber. He figures that’s a problem for another time.

When he finally turns back to Luke, the jedi is watching him with wide blue eyes. So much of him looks different now -- his hair, the lines on his face, the emotionless set of his mouth, how he carries himself -- but his eyes are the same. He’s given Din that same silently-pleading look a hundred times before, to mean a hundred different things. _Let me fly a Y-wing, let me try this barrel roll, let me get away with not eating that awful oatmeal, let me tuck my freezing fingers under your chin, let me cheat at sabacc and don’t tell Han. Come here, kiss me, tell me what you want to do to me, come back, don’t get up yet, five more minutes._

Din’s never said no to him in any way that matters. He’s not about to start now.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, Luke. Lead the way.”

As he follows Luke and Artoo back through the destroyer, past legions of wrecked, sparking droids, Din’s mind goes to the same no-thinking place it goes to when he’s under attack. Normally this state of being serves to fend of the oh-so-human response of total and complete panic that something wants to kill you, but right now it’s fending off something worse, something bigger.

In the hangar bay, Luke loads Artoo into his X-wing -- he’s still flying the same damn X-wing, all these years later -- and turns to look at Din uncertainly. “The _Razor Crest?”_ he asks.

Din shakes his head.

“Alright,” Luke breathes. “I guess we’ll have to borrow something, then.”

He decides on an Imperial _Lambda_ -class shuttle, big enough to fit all of them but not comfortable for a long journey, which tells Din that wherever they’re going, it’s not far from here. He lets Luke handle the launch procedures on his own, the quiet beeps and trills of the ship’s controls drifting through the open cockpit door, and settles with Grogu into one of the sixteen empty jump seats.

Grogu touches his chin, and Din looks at him with a start. He’d forgotten he wasn’t wearing his helmet. It’s tucked under his arm. He moves to put it back on, then pauses. There’s really no reason to, is there?

“We’re heading to Yavin,” Luke says.

Din startles again. He didn’t notice them take off, or Luke come back, but he’s leaning in the open door, and behind him, the viewscreen is streaked with blue-shift stars. “Yavin?” he echoes.

“I’m building a school in the old Rebel base. Well, the old jedi temple, that became a Rebel base, that…” he trails off, eyes locked on Din’s face. There’s something desperate in his expression that Din doesn’t feel certain enough to name, anymore.

“Your jacket blew up,” he tells Luke.

Luke blinks. “My jacket?”

“The one you left. It was in the _Razor Crest,_ when it exploded.”

Luke stares at him for a long moment, then says, “Oh. Oh, well -- That’s okay. As long as _you_ weren’t in the _Razor Crest_ when it exploded.”

“I wasn’t,” Din says pointlessly.

“Good.”

Their gazes hold for another minute, like two gunslingers locked in a standoff, and then at what seems like exactly the same instant, they both fold. A smile pulls at Din’s mouth, and Luke breaks into relieved laughter, the sort of laughter that usually signifies they’ve just gotten away from something that should’ve killed them.

“I’m sorry,” Luke says, “I’m sorry, I know we have a lot to talk about, and this is very serious, I just -- “ and then he breaks off, because Din sets Grogu down on the seat with his helmet, crosses the passenger cabin in two strides, and pulls him into a kiss. Luke makes a noise against his mouth like he’s breaking in half and clings to his shoulders as Din backs him up against the doorframe, one hand moving to cradle the side of Din’s face, and Din needs to be _closer,_ so he hefts Luke up and feels Luke’s legs go around his waist, and -- _yeah. Much better._

One minute or a million years later, Grogu kicks Din’s helmet onto the floor and says _Boo._ At the noise, Luke tips his mouth away from Din’s, but he’s still smiling, still close enough that they’re sharing the same breath.

He runs his gloved thumb over Din’s upper lip, presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth, and says, “I like the mustache.”

**XX.** _Personal correspondence, Anakin Skywalker to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Recovered by Alderaanian Royal Library._

“Master. Obi-Wan.

“I don’t think I’ll ever send this comm. Padmé told me today that she’s pregnant. I’m terrified, and not just about becoming a father. I’ve been having these dreams…like the visions you told me you used to have when you were a padawan. She’s going to die. I don’t know how to save her, or if I even can. I know that I need your help, but I don’t know how to ask for it without hurting you. So, if I send this, I’ll start by saying I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I fell in love with someone who isn’t you, that I married someone who isn’t you, that we’re having children together, but I think that I was born with a greedy heart -- a heart that needs to take more than it can give. I know the best thing I could do right now is tell you everything, about the Chancellor and Padmé and the mistakes I’ve made, but I’m terrified about that, too, because the second I open my mouth it might all come crashing down around me.

“I trust you, Obi-Wan, more than I trust myself. I’m trying to remember that, now. Trying to convince myself that, as long as you and I are together, we can handle anything the universe throws at us. I want to believe it. I’m trying really hard to believe it. But you’re far away and the distance makes me doubt myself.

“One thing I will never doubt is this: I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you.

“Yours. Always. Anakin.”

**XXI.** Luke is different, now. Quieter, more reserved. Less obvious with his affections, even if he’s no less generous with them, and just as quick to make a joke even if his jokes are softer now, less boisterous. Part of it is that he’s grown up -- he’s not a twenty-one-year-old anymore, full of bravado and absent the tempering benefit of experience. He’s lived most of a decade in Din’s absence, and as much as it unsettles Din to realize there are things about Luke he doesn’t know anymore, he thinks it would be worse to find that he was unchanged, because then he wouldn’t seem real.

This Luke is real. As much as he’s the same man Din’s spent five years pining for, he’s also not -- he’s steadier, more sure of himself than the old Luke ever was, in a way that reminds Din of a battle-hardened warrior. They don’t do any fighting in the temple on Yavin -- mostly it’s cleaning out rooms that haven’t seen daylight in a century and trying to fit new wiring where no wiring has ever been -- but Luke never stops in the middle of a task, like he used to, and admits that he doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing; he doesn’t need any guidance when it comes to caring for Grogu, doesn’t need to be supervised when handling boiling water. (“I scalded myself enough in your absence -- I’m pretty good at brewing tea now.”)

He doesn’t drink caf anymore, and when Din asks him why he says, “A little green gremlin beat the habit out of me. Now it’s all herbal tea, all the time.”

“A little green gremlin,” Din says, incredulous. “You mean, like him?”

At the table, Grogu coos as if to say _who, me?_

“Kind of,” Luke says, pouring tea for the baby. “Much meaner, though.”

In the mornings, Din often finds Luke in meditation in one of the open-air sections, sometimes floating a few inches above the ground, sometimes cross-legged in the soft green grass, his eyes closed, face tilted into the sun. The Luke Din knew before couldn’t sit still for more than a few seconds without fidgeting, but this one seems to draw -- almost always -- from a deep well of inner peace. The Force, Din suspects.

One morning, a week or so into their stay, Din gets up the courage to go out and sit next to him. He doesn’t say anything, content to sit with Luke in the warm sun and the easy breeze until Luke bats his eyes open. He looks almost surprised to find Din there, like he couldn’t sense him, and the thought sends a spike of pain through Din’s chest.

“Our dyad bond,” he says, before he can chicken out. “Did you break it?”

Luke’s mouth falls open. “Did I…” he echoes, then says, “No. No, Din, I didn’t break. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Then what?” Din asks. “What did you do?”

He’s not sure what answer he’s expecting, but it’s not for tears to well up in Luke’s eyes. He hasn’t thought about it directly since they found each other, but Din realizes now that he hadn’t expected this new version of Luke to be _able_ to cry, and seeing it, it’s like something roars back to life deep in his chest -- something he forgot he could feel. He reaches for Luke at the same moment that Luke comes up on his knees and tips towards him, lips pressed into a tight line, like he’s holding it all in until he can hide his face in the safe harbor of Din’s shoulder and choke out a sob. Din holds him through it, Luke’s body shaking in his arms, and after a while he realizes Luke’s saying something, over and over again: _I’m sorry._

“Hey,” he hushes, petting the back of Luke’s head. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Luke, whatever it is.”

“It’s _not,”_ Luke snaps, sitting back. He hasn’t said anything that forceful since they got here, and it sends a jolt down Din’s spine. _There you are_ , he thinks. _You’re still in there_. “It’s not okay. I hurt you. I left just like your covert left -- “

He breaks off, taking Din’s face between his hands. “I thought I had to,” he says. “I’m so, _so_ sorry.”

Din holds onto his wrists, and they sit there tangled together as the sun rises. Luke tells him about discovering his father’s journals in Artoo’s memory, about seeing Ben’s ghost on Hoth, how Ben told him he needed to train with Master Yoda, but couldn’t take his dyad with him. “I thought I would just -- I don’t know, train for a couple weeks and come back,” Luke admits, and Din shakes his head and laughs, because really, only Luke would think that sort of training could be accomplished in a _week_. “Then there was the trap in Cloud City,” Luke says, and tells Din a story that he already knows some pieces of: how Han’s old friend Lando used him, Chewie and Leia as bait to draw Luke to Bespin, so Vader could freeze Luke in carbonite. “Boba Fett got to keep Han,” Luke says. “I wanted to find you, then, but Leia was worried you might still be in contact with Fett. So I agreed to wait six months, until we could get Han back, and then you were _gone -- “_

He breaks off with another sob, and Din can’t think of anything to do but kiss him, so he does. He kisses him, and keeps kissing him -- small, comforting presses of lips -- until Luke turns into him like a tree turning toward the sun, his fingertips digging into Din’s back, and breathes out a shaky exhale. “I tried to find you,” he says, much quieter, into the space between their faces. “I tried, Din, for so long, but I stretched the tether too far. You could’ve been anywhere.”

“I’m here now,” Din tells him. “Don’t stretch the tether again, okay?”

Luke nods, and kisses him some more.

Their tether is almost as short as it was at the beginning, now. If one of them’s on the roof, the other can be on the first floor, but not in the basement. Admittedly, it does pose some logistical problems when they start running shield wiring up the outside of the temple, but Din’s not about to suggest that Luke make it longer -- he’d rather endure the gentle tug on his heart, like a reminder that Luke’s still there, that he hasn’t lost him again.

Luke and Grogu get on like a house on fire, which in some ways is terrifying and in others is everything Din’s ever wanted -- which he guesses is terrifying in a whole other way. _Fear is born from happiness,_ after all, and when Din wakes up one morning to find Luke teaching Grogu to levitate eggs at their makeshift kitchen table, he leans in the door with his face bare, sleep still crusty in the corners of his eyes, watching them in the yellow sunlight, and can’t remember ever being so happy.

They sleep in different rooms, at first, in different beds. Even with that first rush of passion on the Imperial shuttle, it’s been tricky to figure out how to come together again, like two ships that got new docking equipment. They’re learning, though, so when Din wakes one night from a nightmare that isn’t his own, he doesn’t hesitate to jog down the hall to Luke’s room and push through the door.

Luke stares at him from the bed, wide-eyed, breathing hard.

Din feels a tug at his heart that has nothing to do with their bond. Luke doesn’t react when Din sits on the edge of the bed, when he pulls him into his arms, but when Din tucks his chin on top of Luke’s head he says, shell-shocked, “Did I wake you?”

“It’s okay,” Din assures him.

Luke’s hands curl into fists in the back of his shirt. “I woke you.”

“You can wake me,” Din says. He pulls back and takes Luke’s face in his hands, forcing him to meet his eyes. “You can always wake me. But what happened to the -- “ he wiggles his fingers next to his head. “You know, that mind-calming thing you used to do?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Luke says, eyes downturned. “I mean, I didn’t want to intrude.”

“You’re not intruding,” Din tells him, resisting the urge to shake him, and then, when Luke still doesn’t look like he believes him, “ _Luke_. I love you. I want you to be able to sleep at night. You’re not intruding.”

Luke stares at his mouth. “You love me,” he echoes, disbelieving.

“You’re my heart,” Din says. It’s the truth.

Luke turns his mouth against Din’s cheek, not really a kiss. “I love you too,” he murmurs, like he’s been waiting ages to say it, like the second the words leave his mouth they take a huge weight off his shoulders. “ _Din._ Come here, will you?”

“I’m already here,” Din says, but he still goes, letting Luke draw him down to bed.

He doesn’t go back to his own room that night, or the night after, or any night after that. They re-learn each other’s bodies the same way they re-learned each other’s hearts and minds, they same way they learned each other the first time, years ago, before Din knew that Luke was something he could survive losing -- but that he didn’t want to survive losing. Din sucks bright red marks around the lightning bolt scars that snake across Luke’s chest like tributaries, like a watershed map of how Luke didn’t die, feeling the flutter of Luke’s heartbeat under his lips and sending thanks to any gods that will listen that Luke is here with him, winding his hands in Din’s curls and throwing a leg over Din’s shoulder -- and that this, at least, is exactly the same. Luke still swears like a smuggler in bed, still says Din’s name urgently when he’s about to come, still traces lazy nonsensical patterns on Din’s skin in the sweet, sweaty aftermath of their lovemaking.

 _You know the important stuff,_ Din remembers he told Luke, once. And he thinks, even with all the things that hurt between them, that much, at least, is still true. Din knows what Luke loves. _How_ he loves. He knows what he regrets, what he would change if he could, what he wouldn’t. He knows what Luke is like in war, in the dirt and the mud and the cold, how he endures the small daily indignities and the impossible tragedies, how he rallies when he’s been kicked and kicked and kicked again, how he can find a smile for a friend even when there’s nothing to smile about and hope where there’s none.

And he knows where Luke sleeps -- burrowed under the many, many blankets in their bed, freezing toes tucked under Din’s feet, snoring like an eopie.

What else is there?

**Author's Note:**

> andthepeople.tumblr.com


End file.
